Mapping the Afghanistan Elections

August 20th, 2009by Sean Gorman

In our last post we talked about the portable GeoIQ appliance we sent over to Afghanistan with Todd Huffman. Todd and his team have been busy collecting data and we've been pushing it up to GeoCommons and our Afghan election dash board. There has been a steady flow of data, providing many diverse perspectives on the election. The most detailed data has been for the Eastern Afghanistan area around Jalalabad where Todd is deployed, but we've also collected several nation wide data sets. I'll keep a running list on the blog or you can search in Finder with the Afghan09 tag. Eastern Afghanistan Data UNMA (United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan) Electoral Overview in Eastern Region, Afghanistan, 2009 UNAMA Nangarhar Region Tribal Candidate support Percentages, Afghanistan, 2009 Average Risk Assessments of Polling Locations by District, Eastern District of Afghanistan, 2009 Presidential Election JICA Count of Security Incidents, Eastern Region of Afghanistan, April 2009 Polling Stations and Expected turn Out for Laghman, Eastern Region Afghanistan UNDP Election Monitoring JICO Eastern Region Afganistan - Weekly Security Report, Afganistan, April 12 2009 Afghanistan Nation Wide Data Afghanistans NGO Safety Office (ANSO) report, August 1-15, 2009, Afghanistan Afghanistan Presidential Election Results, Afghanistan by Province, 2004 JICA Threat Assessment of Afghanistan, Districts, April 2009 WITS, IED Attacks in Afghanistan, from 7/31/2008 - 3/31/2009 International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), Afghanistan, 2009 If you search GeoCommons for "Afghanistan" there are over 140 data sets with a variety of political, economic, cultural, infrastructure and physical data available. Going through the data I've been fascinated by the relationship between tribes, politics and violence. Afghanistan is a complex region with many interwoven relations that make up the social and political fabric. I think maps are a great way to dig in and understand these nuances.
This maps illustrates polling threat assessment in blue by district with the location of polling stations sized by expected voter turn out. The next map shows the voter turn out with support for the two major candidates - Karzai and Abdullah
High percentage of support for Karzai can be seen in the grey areas and high support for Abdullah can be seen in the locations with large green squares (the centroid of the tribal areas seen in grey). For eastern Afghanistan it looks like the support of the Shinwari tribe for Karzai in areas with high voter turn out could help give him the edge over Abdullah whose Pashayi support looks to have a smaller expected voter turnout. Based on the threat assessment there could be violence in the Southeastern sections of Shinwari that could impact support for Karzai. There are a multitude of way to combine and map the data, so please jump in and check it out. We'll be posting more data as it becomes available.

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