Category: Politics

An Online Atlas of Canadian Election Results

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Election-atlas.ca is an online atlas of federal and provincial election results in Canada. At the federal level the maps go back as far as the 1925 general election; provincial election maps go back as far as the late 1960s or early 1970s. Poll-by-poll results are available for the most recent elections.

This is a huge resource, all the more impressive given the scope of the data and the fact that it seems to have been done by just one person: J. P. Kirby, a self-described “regular guy interested in politics and elections. I’m also a map geek.” (Naturally.) What I like best is that the atlas shows the historical electoral district boundaries for each election, which is fascinating on its own but must have taken some digging on Kirby’s part. (Also kind of weird to see early 20th-century results overlaid on a modern, OSM-based map with airports and freeways and so on.)

Previously: 1895 Electoral Atlas of Canada.

Trumpworld

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Peter Kuper, “Trumpworld,” The New Yorker, 12 January 2018.

It’s been a while since we last saw a map of Donald Trump’s world view (previously), but now, inspired by the president’s reported comments about shithole countries, we have a new one from The New Yorker’s Peter Kuper. [Facebook/Twitter]

Previously: The Huffington Post Maps Trump’s World.

North Carolina’s Gerrymandered Congressional District Map Ruled Unconstitutional

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

North Carolina’s congressional district map has been ruled unconstitutional by a panel of federal judges, the New York Times reports. Significantly, it’s because the map represented a partisan gerrymander, engineered to ensure a Republican stranglehold on North Carolina’s congressional delegation, rather than a racial gerrymander. Partisan gerrymanders have not previously been considered illegal; it’ll be interesting to see what the eventual and inevitable Supreme Court ruling on this (and other gerrymandering cases) will be.

Route 338: A Giant Educational Map About Canada’s Political System

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

I’ve mentioned Canadian Geographic’s giant floor maps, which are loaned out to schools and come with additional teaching materials, before (namely, the Vimy Ridge map). Now CTV News takes a look at another one of their maps, this one focusing on Canada’s political system and improving students’ “democratic literacy.” It’s called Route 338, and it’s a 10.7×7.9m (35′×26′) floor map of Canada showing the boundaries of its 338 federal electoral districts. Route 338 is a collaboration between Canadian Geographic Education and CPAC (the Canadian equivalent of C-SPAN). [CAG]

xkcd’s 2016 Election Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Randall Munroe

The maps that appear from time to time on xkcd are usually a lot more whimsical than the one Randall posted today: his somewhat belated “2016 Election Map” assigns one figure for every 250,000 votes for each of the 2016 presidential election candidates. As Randall says in the alt text,1 “I like the idea of cartograms (distorted population maps), but I feel like in practice they often end up being the worst of both worlds—not great for showing geography OR counting people. And on top of that, they have all the problems of a chloro… chorophl… chloropet… map with areas colored in.” This is an issue that election map cartographers regularly have to deal with, as many of my readers know well.

Mapping the Alabama Senate Election Results

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
MCI Maps (Matthew C. Isbell)

The results of last week’s special Alabama senate election have been crunched and mapped. Matthew Isbell looks at some of the factors that contributed to Doug Jones’s upset win: education, race and voter turnout. Lots of county-by-county choropleth maps to mull over here. Meanwhile, the Washington Post is not the only one to map a salient point: Jones won the state but lost six out of seven congressional districts, thanks to the way those districts were drawn—a function of race, majority-minority districting, and gerrymandering.

Mapping the Chance of an Upset in Alabama

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Washington Post assesses Democrat Doug Jones’s chances against Republican Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate election next month by mapping three factors: the extent to which Moore underperformed Mitt Romney in 2012 (Moore ran for chief justice of Alabama in 2012 at the same time Romney ran for president), the racial makeup of Alabama’s precincts and the 2016 precinct-level election results.

Mapping the Results of Australia’s Same-Sex Marriage Referendum

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Sydney Morning Herald (screenshot)

When it comes to maps of the results of Australia’s same-sex marriage referendum (or, to be more precise, postal survey), it’s a mixed bag. At the official end, the Australian Bureau of Statistics provides infographics, but no maps. The Sydney Morning Herald provides a map of the results by district (see screenshot above), but it’s boolean (yes/no) rather than a choropleth or heat map. For that, you’ll want to look at The Australian’s interactive map (they also have a map showing yes/no by constituency, centred on Sydney, whose western districts voted against the most).

Finally, this map by “lunatic map maker” Matthew Isbell is making the rounds; I want to make sure he’s correctly attributed.

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.

Guns and Voters

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
2016 Election: Exit Poll: Gun-Owning Households (SurveyMonkey)

We’ve seen a lot of maps correlating election results with other demographic or geographic data, but SurveyMonkey’s exit polling on the correlation between politics and gun ownership seems particularly stark, particularly in the context of recent events. In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, nothing predicted who you’d vote for more than whether you had a gun in the house. If only gun-owners voted, Trump would have swept 49 states; if only non-gun-owners voted, Clinton would have won at least 48.

“Over all, gun-owning households (roughly a third in America) backed Mr. Trump by 63 percent to 31 percent, while households without guns backed Mrs. Clinton, 65 percent to 30 percent, according to SurveyMonkey data,” the New York Times reported. “No other demographic characteristic created such a consistent geographic split.”

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 Confederate Monuments

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Politico

Politico maps the locations of Confederate monuments in the United States, and correlates their locations with where African-American populations are concentrated.

The majority of these symbols were dedicated between 1900 and 1920, when the South enacted Jim Crow laws aimed at resegregating society or discriminating against blacks. There was also a notable spike in new symbols during the height of the civil rights movement.

Among states with the highest proportion of African-Americans, Mississippi, whose population is 37 percent black, has more than 130 commemorations, while Louisiana, which is 32 percent black, is home to 91 symbols. Georgia, whose population is 30.5 percent black, has 175 monuments.

There’s an unstated implication there.