The Idaho Secretary of State’s Office unveiled a revamped version of the Vote Idaho website on Thursday as part of its effort to make official elections information easier to access.
The new Vote Idaho site is available at voteidaho.gov and includes information for voters and candidates alike, including links to register to vote, request an absentee ballot, find your polling location, view election results, access campaign finance data or obtain the forms necessary to run for office in Idaho.
Many of the functions and reports on the website were available previously. What’s new is moving everything that had been spread out across multiple government websites and making it all available under the Vote Idaho umbrella via a single redesigned website.
Funding for revamping the website came from the Idaho Legislature, while communications director Chelsea Carattini handled a lot of the work making Vote Idaho more user friendly, Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane said in an interview at the Idaho State Capitol in Boise.
“This is part of the one-time appropriation that we got last year to update access to voter information and improve the voting experience,” McGrane said. “We launched a new and improved Vote Idaho website that should be a lot easier to use and have a lot of good information in terms of the election coming up.”
What can residents expect to see on the Vote Idaho website?
One of the features of the new website is an elections calendar that includes a countdown to the May 21 state primary elections, as well as a list of important dates for candidates to file for office, online voter registration deadlines and the deadline to request an absentee ballot.
The Vote Idaho website will also have a list of candidates who filed for U.S. representative, state representative, state senator, Idaho Supreme Court justice and appellate court judge once the filing period opens.
The Vote Idaho website is also optimized for mobile, meaning Idahoans can access the site’s features from their phone or device while they are on the go.
In an interview, Carattini said her goals for the project were to make Vote Idaho simple, clean and user friendly.
“Voters need to feel like there are not a lot of obstacles to voting, that it’s just simple and easy,” Carattini said. “I wanted the whole site to reflect that.”
McGrane said his office is already working on an additional enhancement to Vote Idaho it plans to launch later this year. The staff is working on adding a feature that will allow any voter in Idaho to view their sample ballot with their relevant races and ballot questions. Up until this point, Ada County has made sample ballots accessible to voters online, but the feature is not available throughout the state.
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