As one of many apps focusing on the 2008 presidential election, Elections shows interesting potential but falls short of being truly useful and informative.  Brought to the iPhone by developer Magnificent Library, the app provides lists of candidates for presidential, US congress, gubernatorial and state legislature elections.  Name, party and home state of each candidate is shown with further options to web search the candidate.  This could be a great source of information but unfortunately the web sites provided are too few, some are listed more than once and it is unclear how random these search results are. The web searches also caused my iPhone to crash and at one point McCain’s websites came up for every candidate in every election.

Elections differs from other similar apps in providing information on more than just the presidential election but while the idea behind the app is good and it could be a great tool for keeping up with current political ballots it is too limited.  Other apps like Election ‘08 or Electoral 08 focus solely on the current presidential election but offer useful tools.  Election ‘08 by one-man Seattle-based developer Chimp Software shows constantly updated tracking polls, which can be viewed in any given order.  Electoral 08 by iPhone app developer Zentropy Software on the other hand allows users to check possible 2008 election outcomes with a map of the US, which can be changed by state into a user-defined pattern of red and blue.

The best-case scenario would be an app that combines different aspects of each of these three, showing information on more than just the presidential election with up-to-date polls and a map of the US reflecting those polls.

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category: Misc Reference, Reference