Voting today in the US elections? Check-in on Foursquare, and you’ll get a special badge. Checking-in also powers a special map that Foursquare is offering showing voting in real time.
If you’re checking into a designated polling place, the badge should just appear for you after your check-in. Here’s what I received today:
If you don’t find a designated polling place listed, or if you want to be absolutely positive of getting the badge, just check in and use the #ivoted hashtag. Foursquare explains more in its blog post here.
All the check-ins are also being used to power a special “I Voted” map from Foursquare:
You can see markers for each state flashing on-and-off, indicating votes within them, but not exactly where. It’s pretty obvious at this point there’s going to be voting in all the states happening, so that’s not too helpful.
Clicking on a state reveals more info (I’ve had to click multiple times to get it to work, however). When that information loads, it’s more interesting:
You can see total check-ins so far, breakdown by gender and supposedly the peak voting time. I say supposedly, because often I couldn’t get any time to show for different states I checked.
After repeatedly trying with New York, I finally got a nice display with hour-by-hour check-ins to load:
You can also drill into a particular area to see check-in at a hyper-local level:
Disappointingly, I couldn’t find my own check-in or polling location listed on the map above for my area, so I’m not sure how accurate these maps really are. But perhaps they’ll improve over the course of the day.
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