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Maps for elections

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saleiva edited this page Jan 10, 2014 · 10 revisions

Page defining the structure of the new landing page dedicated to election maps where we explain the real-time capabilities and we publish some tutorials related with this

Past examples

Description of real-time maps

Media coverage for elections is huge, and basically there are two different moments where people got interested about the results with different requirements; When the votes are being counted - where people wants to see how the results are appearing/changing- and after the results are official - where people is willing to spend some time analyzing the results.

For the first of these moments, real-time maps are a must. We need maps that get refreshed each XX seconds/minutes to display the latest results. Another interesting thing to visualize during the counting stage is the changes on trends.

Templates

I'm almost inclined to recommend that we have at least two templates here, one tile and one vector. The reason that the tile version could be sweet is that we could expose some of the CartoDB zoom based simplification methods while reducing the number of map views they have to worry about (real-time maps with any refresh could eat map-views if tile based...)

Apart from the technology side, a thing that is very common in election maps is the possibility to compare the actual results with the latest elections. This could be done by showing two maps at the same time or creating an 'swipe to compare' map like this.

The most common way to visualize this data is by creating choropleth maps showing the distribution of winner parties or bubble maps which also can show the how big is the difference between the winner and the second one (Size of lead).

Another thing that is very common is a way to visualize the seats distribution for each political party.

Ideally for creating a new Election map, an user would only have to create tables with the specified model (we can generate some SHP with fake data to make easier for them to get started) and configure some easy options on a config file.

Features

Key features and a rundown of configurable parameters in our templates (things like, refresh rate, color scheme, etc.)

Data model

  • Candidate_X_name [string]
  • Candidate_X_votes [number]
  • Candidate_X_party [string]
  • Candidate_X_party_color [string]
  • Adm_region [geometry]
  • Adm_region_attribute(s) (imagine GDP, unemployment rate, etc...) [number]

Documentation

obv...

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