By Shearon Roberts
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Maryland voters will be able to research more than 600 statewide candidates this election year on a first-of-its-kind Web site that offers unprecedented access to candidate profiles, campaign reports and user-friendly data about polling places and voter registration.

The Maryland Voter Information Clearinghouse ( http://mdelections.umbc.edu ) was launched yesterday through a partnership of the state and the University of Maryland Baltimore County and is one of the first of its kind in the country, said Linda Lamone, state administrator of elections, at an event on the campus.

The project's goal is to break down barriers to voting by allowing residents to verify that they are registered, learn voting districts, find polling places and seek information about the candidates they can vote for. Among other features, voters can get directions to polling stations.

"This is fabulous," said Lu Pierson, president of the League of Women Voters of Maryland, one of the groups on an advisory board for the project. "I think this is a way to engage particularly younger voters. They tend to go to the Internet for everything."

The State Board of Elections began the partnership with UMBC last year to create the National Center for the Study of Elections to take a multidisciplinary approach to looking at the election process, said Ross Goldstein, deputy administrator of elections. The center pulls the university's political science, computer science and information technology resources together to look at ways to use new technologies to enhance election administration and voting.

UMBC faculty and graduate students maintain the site, and the state Board of Elections supplies candidate and voter information. The center hopes to extend the service by 2010 to include county races, offering information on 2,000 or more additional candidates.

Residents can access their registration information only after matching first and last names with date of birth and Zip code, said Donald Norris, director of the center. "We're not making public anything by law that's not already publicly available in Maryland," Norris said.

All candidates were contacted and given a unique user log-on and password to add biographical details on their profile pages.