Foursquare Offers “I’ve Voted” Badge & Real Time Check-In Map

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 […]

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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:

IMG 0614.PNG

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:

I Voted 2012

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:

I Voted 2012 1

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:

I Voted 2012 2

You can also drill into a particular area to see check-in at a hyper-local level:

I Voted 2012 3

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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Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land, MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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