Tag: elections

Electing the House of Representatives, 1840-2016

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

There’s a lot of stuff relevant to our interests on the website of the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab, and it’s hard to know what to begin with. One of the more recent projects, which CityLab saw fit to link to yesterday, is an interactive map showing elections to the U.S. House of Representatives from 1840 to 2016. It’s the kind of project that the user can get very, very lost in. In addition to the usual map of U.S. congressional districts, the site can also visualize the districts as a dot map to minimize the empty-land-doesn’t-vote problem (they call it a cartogram: it isn’t). There’s also a timeline showing the overall results over time at a glance; selecting a district gives shows how the district voted in past contests as a line graph. In other words: quite a lot of data, economically presented.

An Interactive Map of the Quebec Election Results

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

CBC News’s interactive map of last month’s provincial election in Quebec gives us a detailed look at who won each poll, and by how much (percentages, not raw numbers), and compares those results with those from the 2014 election. The map highlights where the pockets of support for each of Quebec’s parties can be found; comparing those pockets with the 2014 results is quite revealing. (The 2018 election was a bit of a watershed, as support bled from the established Liberal Party and Parti Québecois to the upstart CAQ, which won, and Québec Solidaire.) Here’s the accompanying story from CBC News.

Previously: Mapping the Quebec Election Results.

What If Only … Voted: 2018 Edition

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

FiveThirtyEight looks at the polling data for the upcoming 2018 midterm elections and imagines the results for the U.S. House of Representatives if only women, men, nonwhite voters and white voters by education level voted. It’s a thought exercise they’ve indulged in before, with the presidential race in 2016, and it serves to indicate the demographic divide in voting intentions. (Cartographically, the maps suffer from the usual problem of U.S. election maps of congressional districts—large, sparsely populated districts in the middle of the country dominate the map.)

Previously: Trump, Clinton and the Gender Gap; What If Only … Voted?

Mapping the Quebec Election Results

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
CBC News

These CBC News infographics explore the results of last week’s provincial election in Quebec, comparing the vote share of the political parties among key socioeconomic and linguistic populations where there were the highest correlations. The maps are constituency level and use a modified hexagon grid to control for population density. [Canadian Geographers]

Mapping the 2018 Colombian Presidential Election, First Round

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The first round of Colombia’s presidential election was held yesterday. Reddit user jesaub posted this map of the first-round results to r/MapPorn; unlike other maps I’ve seen, it drills down to the municipal level, but as a static map (and fairly low-res at that) it’s not able to show much else. For an interactive map of the results, see El Tiempo’s page, which maps by department but provides municipal-level results via search.

The New York Times Maps the Virginia Governor’s Race

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
The New York Times

The New York Times’s graphics department generally does very good election maps, and their work on yesterday’s gubernatorial election in Virginia is no exception. I particularly like how the interactive map toggles from a standard choropleth map to maps that better account for population density, show the size of each candidate’s lead and the shift in vote since the 2016 presidential election.

More Maps of the 2017 German Federal Election

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Benjamin Hennig, Views of the World.

Cartogrammer extraordinaire Benjamin Hennig has produced cartograms of the 2017 German federal election results. A second set of cartograms looks at voter turnout and each party’s share of the vote. These cartograms distort for population to compensate for densely populated areas, so that the choropleth maps used for election results are proportionate.

The German data visualization studio webkid worked on a number of election maps; they have a roundup of election maps and infographics they worked on as well as from other media organizations.

The 2017 German Federal Election

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Berliner Morgenpost (screenshot)

A quick tour around European news sources this morning turned up few, or small, maps of the results of yesterday’s federal election in Germany. (At least so far: it’s only been a day, and I wasn’t very thorough.) I’ve mostly seen graphs and other infographics being used to show the results: see ZDF’s gallery. But yesterday Maps Mania found the Berliner Morgenpost’s live map of the results, which presumably was being updated in real time yesterday. German elections are a little complicated, so the map has a number of tabs showing various aspects of the results: first (constituency) and second (party) votes, who came second or third, where various parties got the bulk of their support and so forth.

Mapping the 2017 French Presidential Election (First Round)

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

France held the first round of its presidential election this past Sunday. Unlike U.S. presidential elections, it’s by popular vote, with the top two vote-getters moving on to a second round in two weeks’ time.

The major candidates’ support was distributed unevenly around the country. Media organizations used several different methods to show this. The New York Times used a choropleth map, showing who among five candidates (including Lassalle, excluding Hamon, who finished fifth but does not appear to have won a commune: ouch) finished first on a commune-by-commune basis. Of course, when you have four candidates finishing within a few points of one another, when you win a district, you don’t necessarily win by much. The print edition of Le Figaro included choropleth maps detailing five candidates’ regional support as well.

Both the Times and Le Figaro use geographical maps, which can be misleading because of the number of votes concentrated in large cities, as Libération’s Julien Guillot points out. (This comes up in most countries’ elections, to be honest—certainly the ones where it’s the popular vote, rather than the constituency, that’s being looked at.) Slate uses a cartogram to compensate for that. (Both of these pages are in French.)

For those seeking local results rather than analysis, several French media organizations provide them through a very similar map interface: see, for example, the online results pages for France 24, Le Figaro and Le Monde. Each begins with a map of France: clicking on a département provides results for that département that includes a map showing each commune, which can also be clicked on. For some reason neither France 24 nor Le Monde show actual vote totals at the local level, which doesn’t seem sensible in an election by popular vote.

Finally, a couple of outliers. This page looks at the results from all presidential elections under the French Fifth Republic. And this page marks the 56 communes in which Marine Le Pen received not a single vote.

Austrian Presidential Election Cartograms

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
austromorph.space
austromorph.space

The second round re-vote of the Austrian presidential election took place yesterday. (The first round took place on 24 April; a repeat of the second round, narrowly won by Alexander Van der Bellen on 22 May, was ordered by the Constitutional Court.) Full, final results are not yet available, but austromorph.space has created the above cartogram of the preliminary results—showing, as you might expect, the strength of winning independent candidate Alexander Van der Bellen in the cities; support for the far-right FPÖ’s Norbert Hofer shrinks when you change from a map to a cartogram.

There are other cartograms of earlier rounds of the Austrian presidential election on the austromorph.space website.

3D Election Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Mapping U.S. election results by county and state is a bit different than mapping results by electoral or congressional district, because counties and states don’t have (roughly) equal populations. Choropleth maps are often used to show the margin of victory, but to show the raw vote total, some election cartographers are going 3D.

galka-prism-map

Max Galka of Metrocosm has created an interactive 3D map of county-level results (above) using his Blueshift tool. The resulting map, called a prism map, uses height to show the number of votes cast in each county.

Here’s a similar 3D interactive map, but using state-level rather than county-level data, by Sketchfab member f3cr204. [Maps on the Web]

The New York Times Maps the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
2016-election-nyt-two-americas
The New York Times

The New York Times has a first-rate graphics department, and they’ve come up with some stunning ways to depict the 2016 U.S. presidential election results. They updated their maps of so-called “landslide counties” (see previous entry), which was straightforward enough. Their feature on how Trump reshaped the election map, with arrows showing the county-by-county swing (red and to the right for Trump, blue and to the left for Clinton), was unexpectedly good. But their maps of the Two Americas (above), imagining Trump’s America and Clinton’s America as separate countries, with bodies of water replacing the areas won by their opponents—Trump’s America is nibbled at the edges by coastlines and pockmarked by lakes; Clinton’s is an archipelago—is quite simply a work of art. Incredible, incredible work.