A very cool feature has popped up on Google Earth that overlays all 436 congressional districts over a map of the United States and highlights the races occurring in each of those districts.

Each race is represented by a star, and when you click the star a box pops up with links to information about the candidates, how to register to vote, and even campaign finance information.

The red borders in this picture are outlines of the congressional districts.

If you haven't seen Google Earth before, download it now. It features incredibly detailed satellite images of the entire world (people have even used it to find North Korean military installations) that are easily searchable and zoom-able. In addition to being some serious eye candy, it's architecture is open to the public, which means that anyone with the urge to map something can create a "layer" on top of the Google's map to show the location of data.

In this case, Google's employees simply created two layers of data: a list of all candidates for U.S. Congress, and a map of all of all of the congressional districts, and laid them over the satellite maps.

Sara Goo reports in the Washington Post:

John Henke, director of Google Earth and Google Maps, told me the project "bubbled up" as an idea from some young Googlers interested in politics who found it hard to find Web sites where they could easily compare candidates. It also fits with Google chief executive Eric Schmidt's "vision for the company in democratizing information and giving access to people who didn't have it before," he told me.

Projects like these should become more abundant as more data is made publicly available. The Sunlight Foundation is launching new searchable databases full of information about how the government spends money and allocates resources. In fact, the pop-ups in Google Earth look a whole lot like the Sunlight Foundation's PopUp Politicians project that enables mini-profiles of candidates to pop up when their names are rolled over on a web page. These pop-ups also include links to campaign finance data, except the PopUp Politicians link actually takes you to individual pages for each incumbent or candidate.

There are innumerable ways to mashup these two data sets. Imagine a Google Earth mashup that shows where Members of Congress go for official travel that includes the amount of taxpayer dollars they spend on those trips (Opensecrets.org lists this information)!

These new layers are automatically added to Google Earth when you open the application; kudos to

Google for adding them, and here's for more mashups to help get out the vote.

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Tags: google earth, election, mashup

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