The Voting Information Project’s Free SMS Tool
This SMS tool was decommissioned in February 2023. Visit our Tools page to learn about our current offerings.
You may be familiar with the Voting Information Project’s (VIP) tools that look like this:
But have you ever used our free SMS Tool?
VIP’s free SMS Tool puts crucial election information directly into the hands of voters. Once data is live in VIP for an upcoming election, voters can text “VOTE” or “VOTO” to GOVOTE (468-683) to find:
polling places, plus early vote and drop-off locations where available,
contact information for local election officials,
and voter registration links.
No setup needed
A huge value add of the VIP SMS tool is that you don’t need to do anything special to use it, just promote it! Sharing the GOVOTE shortcode can be a simple way for all kinds of organizations – including those who may not have capacity to make website updates – to take advantage of the data published in VIP.
Once VIP data is live in the Google Civic Information API, it is available in our SMS tool.
How to know what election data is live
Join the VIP Community Forum! Each time data is published for a particular election, our team updates our community via the forum. In addition, you’ll be able to view a calendar of the elections we plan to cover this year. The calendar also makes it easy to see all the elections that currently have live data.
Meeting voters where they are
While our embeddable Voting Information Tool and Get to the Polls website help voters see locations on a map, we know that voters have different needs. The SMS tool can be particularly helpful for:
Voters who do not have a smartphone – It makes VIP data available via simple text messages.
Voters who need or prefer text-based services
Voters with limited access to the internet – For example, New Jersey used the SMS tool to help voters find their polling places after Hurricane Sandy hit in the fall of 2012.
Like our other free tools, the SMS tool is available in multiple languages.
Contact us at info@votinginfoproject.org with any questions.
About the Voting Information Project
The Voting Information Project is a program of Democracy Works, a 501(c)(3) civic tech nonprofit on a mission to help America vote. VIP has developed a number of free tools aimed at providing election officials more channels to deliver voting information to their constituents, including our SMS Tool. This tool is powered by the official data that VIP ingests from state and local election officials, and is available at no cost.