You won’t have to watch local TV or stay tuned to a web site in order to track all or just the North Carolina election returns that interest you on Tuesday thanks to a partnership between the Internet giant and the State Board of Elections.

Utilizing technology developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Google and North Carolina will make the election data available as it is reported. The results will be made available through Google Search, says Susan Cadrecha, Search Communications Manager at Google.

North Carolina is the first state to agree to a pilot test of the election project. Google also will work with the County of Los Angeles in California.

Google is saying it will provide “full down-ballot results,” from local to national.

As for analysis and projections – well, there will be plenty of other choices for that information via the media.

Josh Lawson, general counsel for the State Board of Elections, says the partnership is not new and adds that its data is made available to other media outlets..

“We have worked with Google and Pew in the past, providing only information already available to media outlets and the public at large,” Lawson said.

The focus of the Google project is the data.

“We will display detailed updates and results for all state and local contests, including the state legislature, local council races, school boards, and specialty districts such as sanitation and water,” Google says.

Google’s Cadrecha says the project is the result of NIST work to provide returns through “a free and open data standard.”

“This is part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology efforts to oversee creation of free and open data standards around the full end-to-end elections process,” she explains. “The first standard that emerged from this effort enables election departments to publish ballot information and election results.”

The process

So what’s involved in finding the returns the people wants?

“You can now search for candidates in most state and local contests such as the Mecklenburg County Soil and Water Conservation District Supervisor and get in-depth and useful results,” Cadrecha noted.

“Then, on election night, searching for those candidates or those contests on Google, will display live election results directly from the State Board of Elections.”

Cadrecha says the partnership with North Carolina stems from Google’s Voting Information Projection in which it has worked with the Pew Charitable Trusts that “promotes the publication of polling location and ballot data in an open data standard.”

Why do this?

“The adoption of high-quality open data standards benefits everyone,” she says.

“Citizens have better access to authoritative information, election departments can lower costs, and innovators can find better ways to disseminate and present the data.”

Why North Carolina?

Google is partnering with North Carolina because she says the “State Board of Elections has a demonstrated commitment to innovation in ways that serve the citizens of North Carolina. Last year the Voting Information Project presented awards to North Carolina and six other states for their commitment over the last decade to using new technologies to serve their voters.

“North Carolina was also involved in the development of this election results standard. In short, we chose this partnership with North Carolina entirely on the basis of our shared commitment to providing accessible and useful election data to the public.”