Innovating Local Democracy

Google today has posted a blog article on their public sector blog about “Choose the Future” - Google’s Japan’s 2009 Election Site. While we’re not native Japanese speakers the idea of it appears clear - to use mapping combined with traditional textual information and images to assist voters make up their minds in their recent elections.

Google may have undertaken this in 2009 but South Dublin County were there pre 2004. South Dublin County Council have been doing this for some time now. The Council’s latest election site is the launchpad to a wealth of local election related material. This material has evolved in the lead up to the election and the associated counting process which was undertaken in a live and dynamic manner.

The South Dublin County Council electoral register enquiry has for many years been displaying registered voters within South Dublin County maps of where their place to vote is - online and available 24 hours a day. Why not check you are on the register today? You don’t need to wait for an election or referendum to be imminent. It’s free, easy, and an interesting use of technology.

Finding out who your local democratically elected member to South Dublin County Council representing your area is easy. Candidate maps were displayed before the elections and now you can access your representatives contact information online on a geographic basis.

In June 2009 at the local elections of South Dublin County Council it was the first year which we displayed election count results to the display screens within the physical local election count centre and published the results simultaneously on the internet. To innovate some more we utilised twitter, email updates, and sms text message updates to followers of the local events.