By state law, every voter who hasn’t opted out receives an information pamphlet by mail prior to every election. Now, thanks to the efforts of CSU East Bay professor Dr. Elizabeth Bergman, there’s an app for that.

Marin, Santa Cruz and Shasta are the three counties in California with access to a new voter guide smart phone application pilot program being tested for the upcoming June 5 presidential primary election.

Created by Bergman, a political science professor, “Voter Guide Now” is free to download on any iPad, iPhone or Android device, and allows users to access the same information contained in the official voter guide, with biographies of candidates running for various offices and pro/con arguments about local and state measures and propositions.

“We want to make election information as easy to find as what’s playing at the movie theater tonight,” Santa Cruz County Clerk Gail Pellerin told Patch.com. “‘The Voter Guide Now’ app provides another tool where voters can get important election information using a device they use to navigate through their daily lives.”

Innovative features include an option to automatically opt out of paper voter guides in the future and a voting cheat sheet that allows users to save their choices for future reference.

The paper pamphlets already distributed in the three participating counties feature a “Quick Response code” or “QR code,” which allows smart phone users to find the app simply by scanning it.

While the information is also available online, the only voter guides for smart phone applications available were created by partisan groups and contained biased information specific to their platform.

According to Bergman, the “Voter Guide Now” app contains the exact same unedited information as the paper pamphlets.

Bergman said she got the idea to create the app after a law was passed in 2010 which made it legal for voters to opt out of paper voter guides. The professor hopes her app will help disseminate vital information to the public and reduce the costs of each election by cutting down the amount of paper pamphlets printed.

“We’re trying to help support the counties and say ‘not only is this a great way to inform voters, but maybe we can save some money here on printing and mailing,’” said Bergman.

The professor, who also works as a consultant for various political campaigns and was a staffer for Senator Dianne Feinstein in the early 1990s, points out the average cost for each county to print and mail the voter guides is around one dollar per person. She contends her app will cost only 31 cents per person, and will aid in the effort to get more voters to opt out of paper delivery in the future.

“In Los Angeles, if 24 percent of their voters opt out of paper, the savings would be a million and a half almost per election, and that’s three percent of their budget,” said Bergman. “They could definitely make an app for that.”

At this point, the app only has a couple hundred users, but Bergman hopes the idea will catch on and be picked up by the rest of the counties in California for the presidential election this November.

“I’m really into voter information,” said Bergman, who specializes in the election process in America. “It doesn’t matter how you’re gonna vote, whether its Republican or Democrat; that information is vital to this country.”