Throughout the US today, citizens are headed to their respective polling locations to cast their vote.
Early indications and media reports are pointing to decent voter turnout. However, if you want to know how the numbers stack-up, just head over to Foursquare who set up a dedicated page for this year's election (elections.foursquare.com) that visualizes check-ins from users that include #iVOTED in their posts.
With help from a company called JESS3, Foursquare will give each user an iVOTED badge after they checkin.
What's interesting about this is the Foursquare website that goes along with the promotion, which includes a real-time map indicating user activity (at the time I wrote this post, embedding the map wasn't functional).
This is a great example of how social media can help crowd-source hyper-local data for brands around any event — major or not. And despite not being a reliable source for voter turn-out overall, it will be interesting to see the cross section in the U.S. of active voters who are also location-based service users.
Have you checked-in, voted and earned your badge yet?
Article first published as Foursquare Maps Real-Time Voter Turn-out with iVOTED Program on Technorati.