Dataset of the Day: Early Voting—November 3, 2008
November 4th, 2008by William Benjamin
By the end of today we will know who our next president is going to be. The first polls close at 6 p.m. in Indiana. Virginia, Georgia, Florida, and New Hampshire follow shortly after at 7 p.m. The last polls close in Alaska at 12 p.m. It seems as though the media, pundits, and pollsters are predicting a lopsided win for Barack Obama. The current data and polls may suggest a win for Obama, however there is still plenty of gray area in states where John McCain could succeed enough to win.
The following maps have been created in Maker to reveal pertinent election coverage and data that my fellow data colleagues and I thought would be helpful going into the big election tonight.
This map displays early voting data for selected states from yesterday:
Pay close attention to Virginia—a highly contested swing state —because if Barack Obama can win in the former Old Confederacy capital of Richmond then the odds of him winning the election will be in his favor.
The following is a map of active registered voters in Virginia:
Here is the latest polling data that shows Obama’s lead vs. McCain’s:
Here is a link to the data set in Finder: http://finder.geocommons.com/overlays/5911
And a link to the map in Maker: http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/1311?page=
Popularity: 20% [?]
November 4th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
[…] would be helpful going into the big election tonight. This map displays early voting data for Read More|||CNN has a pretty handy interactive map showing states doing early voting, and the current early […]
November 4th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
I can relate to this ! , I’ve heard some goody things about this blog ! I bookmarked it on my favorites and will visit it again for more interesting posts like this one, Thanks
David
November 5th, 2008 at 10:25 am
Cesar,
Thanks for your interest in our blog and glad you enjoyed my post. Comments are always welcomed.
Regards,
William
November 5th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
This is the first time I’ve really played with Maker - leave it to an incredible election to get someone riled up for map making, right?
First of all - it is mind-blowingly awesome. Truly a near-perfect interface.
Any ideas where one will be able to access the final 2008 county-level presidential election result data? There must be some federal agency responsible for releasing these, right? I only found campaign contributions at the FEC, and haven’t had luck at state-level data distros. I’m probably missing an obvious source.
Also, am I missing a way to make proportional symbols - as in non-categorized/ size directly correlating with quantity? Maybe that would be a big processing drain…
November 6th, 2008 at 9:49 am
Thanks for the feedback Amenity - good points.
You can actually do proportional symbols right now - though perhaps you didn’t catch it in the Brewer. When choosing the classification, choose “none of these” checkbox. That creates proportional classification.
Regarding the county-level data, it’s not available yet, but we’ll be putting it in as soon as it is.
We’re definitely interested in having organizations put data directly into GeoCommons rather than us having to find it, reformat it, and import it. In fact, some government GIS departments are starting to do this. It’s a great opportunity for them to easily put the data up somewhere that is freely available and easily usable without them having to be concerned with things like data hosting and scaling.
November 6th, 2008 at 10:24 am
When laid out like this you really get to see the big picture and how tight the race is right up to the end. I really like the interface in Maker as well. I like amenity’s idea as well, to compare poll acuracy to actual results regionally.
I used to wrok for DHS and I could see how finder might be useful for tracking ICE case data for regional trends throughout the year … funny enough this is actually an idea I presented to my boss while at DHS but couldn’t find a good mapping program
November 7th, 2008 at 11:54 am
“amenity Says:
November 5th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Any ideas where one will be able to access the final 2008 county-level presidential election result data? There must be some federal agency responsible for releasing these, right?”
Elections are a state subject. Each state has different way of reporting data (even the General/Presidential elections). One has to compile the data from each state agency that is responsible for that, mostly its the office of Secretary of State (SOS) of each state or election boards. In some cases (for eg. New York, Massachusetts etc) the data wont be released for quite a while. We at FortiusOne have started the process, however it will take some time and efforts to geocode the county level results. Here are a few that have been uploaded already to Finder!
Florida
http://finder.geocommons.com/overlays/5934
Virginia
http://finder.geocommons.com/overlays/5933
Pennsylvania
http://finder.geocommons.com/overlays/5932
Ohio
http://finder.geocommons.com/overlays/5931
You will find some of the following on the Finder! over the next several days, Indiana, California, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North and South Carolina and the rest.
November 9th, 2008 at 9:27 am
The following General election results have been uploaded to Finder!
North Carolina
http://finder.geocommons.com/overlays/6026
South Carolina
http://finder.geocommons.com/overlays/6025
Georgia
http://finder.geocommons.com/overlays/6027
Indiana
http://finder.geocommons.com/overlays/6024
Look for more in the coming days. Keyword = “Elections”
November 9th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Great, thanks! I’ll work on finding/processing the ones I want.