Volunteers educate voters about Waterloo region election events

A local volunteer group that helped inform voters during last fall's municipal election is back for the federal election.

Civic Tech WR has a one-stop shop for voting resources, information on candidates and local events people may want to attend.

Haley Rutherford is one of the volunteers who scours the web, including through candidate websites, search engines and on Facebook, to compile a list of information to populate the website waterlooregionvotes.org.

"We're hoping to build on what we've done with the municipal election and start collecting candidate candidate data for the federal election and see what we can do with it," Rutherford said.

Calendar of local events

She said before the municipal election, 9,000 people used their website to access information.

"About 30 per cent of those people use the website the night before or the two days before the election, so we still have that kind of cram for the exam type of experience," she said.

"The feedback we got from people who used it and from candidates, that it was really great to have this one-stop place where you can go."

Rutherford said Elections Canada is the best place for voter information service and to get a list of candidates, but it doesn't tell you where and when those candidates will be out in the community.

The goal is also to crowdsource and have members of the public send them events to help populate the calendar.

"We're really hoping that it can become more of a community effort because it is pretty tricky to track down" all the different events, she said. "We're hoping that we get kind of a critical mass of people contributing then people will really see the value in having a common calendar for election related events."

Voting day is Monday, Oct. 21.