Google May Have Misdirected Thousands of Voters

Election Center polling place finder packed with errors
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 3, 2010 1:45 AM CDT
Google May Have Misdirected Thousands of Voters
Voters cast their ballots at the Sun City Aliante Community Center in Las Vegas.    (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

Hundreds of thousands of voters who used Google to find their assigned polling places may have been sent to the wrong spot. Aristotle, a political technology firm that makes a polling place finder of its own, calculates that one of Google's Election Center apps may have given the wrong information to some 700,000 voters in 12 battleground states, Politico reports. The error rate ranged from 0.001% for Iowa to 18% for Washington state.

"Google is a great company; they do things well. This is not one of them," said Aristotle's CEO. "if you’re being sent to the wrong polling place, it’s a pretty big deal, especially if it’s toward the end of the day, and especially if it’s an election that’s closely contested like 2010. Google officials said yesterday that they were working to fix the service. (More voting stories.)

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