Some Good Election Maps

I really dislike most U.S. election maps. The binary red-blue scheme that dominates most maps is very misleading (see last post) and obscures more interesting patterns. 

I particularly like this map from the Washington Post showing how the political "winds" are shifting.

The red "gusts" to the right show greater Republican support from four years ago while the blue leftward lines show greater support for Democrats. Purple vertical lines are places that saw little change. The legend is complicated but the patterns are pretty clear.

The leftward drift in the Great Plains and diverging areas of the south central states are patterns you won't see on a typical red/blue map. By contrast here is the same map showing the 2016 changes (from 2012). 

This is a nice "scrollytelling" article. When you scroll down enough you can see the two maps animated.

The New York Times, in addition to the usual red-blue offerings has this size of lead map.

One of the best things about this approach is the subtlety of the colors. The clever choice of size of lead makes it so the viewer has a better sense of the population and how certain states were won or lost. Some of the biggest counties have smaller circles because the size of the lead was less than in other places. Largely empty counties are de-emphasized because land doesn't vote.

Election Reminder

As this election insanity wears on here is a previously posted reminder that land doesn't vote, people do. Yes, I have posted this before but it bears repeating.

You will probably see many very red looking maps over the next week or two. Karim Douïeb created this visualization (from the 2016 election) along with a set of visualizations you can step through here. They include a nice map to cartogram transition.

 

Election Maps Elsewhere

Those of us in the USA will be seeing many election maps over the next few days. In the interest of not being every other site, here are some maps of other important elections that have happened this year in large countries that we (myself included) pay much less attention to than we should.

Brazil

In last month's election, incumbent president Dilma Rousseff won both rounds. The map above shows her vote in the runoff election in red and challenger Aecio Neves in blue. On the right is a cartogram - areas proportional to population. Usually cartograms do a better job of showing results but in this case it's actually more difficult to see that she won than the conventional map. I suspect it's due to the strength of support Rousseff saw in the areas she won.

This map uses a gray neutral color instead of the purple we often see in our red-blue maps. This makes for a clearer distinction of areas. Author Diogro Melo does a nice job listing his sources, even for the colors.  He also has a link to the code used to create the cartogram.

India

India had a major parliamentary election in the spring and the BJP with it's allies (the National Democratic Alliance) won a major victory over the Congress party and their allies. A huge number of parties in India would normally make for a colorful map, but in this case it is mostly BJP orange. Congress allies are shown in shades of blue. A cartogram would have shown much more blue with many of the small blue areas being large cities - more colorful, yet uglier as cartograms tend to be.

Indonesia

The world's fourth most populous country had its third presidential election. Twelve parties formed two coalitions with Joko Widodo's coalition winning.

 The red/crimson (what?) color scheme used on Wikipedia is unconventional and barley works. Widodo's winning coalition is red, Subianto and Harvard University are crimson. The geographic pattern is basically Sumatra vs. elsewhere. This map would probably be more interesting with more parties, instead of just the two coalitions. Like, for example, the 2009 Election

Afghanistan

Less populous but also important is Afghanistan. Their election suffered from violence, accusations of fraud and a lack of good maps. Here is the best map I could find.  

Votes for Ashraf Ghani, the declared winner are shown as green proportional circles. Votes for Abdullah Abdullah (the candidate so nice they named him twice) are in purple. The trouble is in making out a pattern underneath the noise of the heavy colors representing ethnicity. A simple dulling of the ethnic colors and/or brightening the circles would help see the relationship between these patterns. Even better would have been to choose colors for the circles that are clearly different from the ethnic colors.

Egypt also had a presidential election. I have not been able to find maps, probably because el-Sisi won 97% of the vote*. I suppose the map would look like this. 

* 97%? A bit above the credibility threshold?
 

Scotland's Independence Vote In Maps

Tomorrow Scotland votes on independence. I don't have a "dog in this fight" though there is a "Duggy Dog" starring in a pro-independence video.

This map does a nice job of illustrating the political situation in service of the Yes campaign.

The Yes campaign also has a video titled Scottish Weather Forecaster Loses It Live On Air with some good map content. Here are a couple of still frames.

On the "No" side there's this map from The Economist full of typically snooty Economist cliches.

We get it. They're a buncha moochers!

Finally, there's the cover of The Battle for Britain by David Torrance...

... and its copycat images.

In Search of a Better Election Map

The Stanford Election Atlas shows election results by polling location. This reveals voting patterns that are not apparent when using the standard state or county maps. Unfortunately last week's election results are not currently mapped so we are looking at the 2008 presidential election.

The map still looks more red at a national scale than the vote actually went (due to the heavy clustering of urban polling locations) but it's not as unbalanced looking as the state and county maps. Two unfortunate aspects of this map are the Platte Carre projection (where Maine appears to be falling asleep from lack of interest) and the ESRI interface. I use ESRI interfaces enough at work to be frustrated with them. You can click on any point to get some detailed statistics and an ugly looking pie chart.

When you zoom in notable patterns emerge such as the cotton belt in the south that I've mentioned in a previous post. Most cities have the standard blue core surrounded by a ring of red. Good examples include Minneapolis and Pittsburgh.

Note the lines of blue along rivers and railroads radiating out from Pittsburgh. This patterns shows up even more clearly along the east coast Metroliner corridor.

However, some cities have a more notable geographic split. Examples of these are San Antonio and Phoenix. I don't know these cities very well but there are almost certainly ethnic/racial divides that explain these patterns. 




A similar divide occurs on a broader scale in the Carolinas where the non-coastal east is strongly blue and the central and western regions are more strongly red.

 There are other maps you can choose and specific maps for some of the swing states. Hopefully they plan on posting the 2012 results in the future and maybe they'll find a better map projection too. Also, maybe the next map will include Oregon, strangely omitted here. Must be that Stanford-Oregon football rivalry.

"Dangerous" Mapmakers

The October 2012 issue of the Atlantic has an article by Robert Draper about redistricting called The League of Dangerous Mapmakers.The article profiles experts at drawing maps to the advantage of their political party. It also discusses how GIS software has enabled amateurs to get in on the action, often with messy or even counterproductive results. An example being the messy situation in Texas that cost that state an early primary, highlighted here in January. The illustrator (uncredited, possibly the author) had some fun with the districts.

Another Texas Redistricting Fight

The Texas Legislature drew the new congressional district map to protect Republican incumbents. However, the map may be in violation of the Voting Rights Act because it suppresses the opportunity for minority representation. Texas has gained four new seats in congress because of its population growth - 65% of which came from Hispanics. As a result a federal court in San Antonio has drawn their own map. This map could result in Democrats gaining up to four new seats. Here are the maps via the Houston Chronicle.

The fight is going to the Supreme Court and if not acted upon quickly will force the state to delay its April primary for a month or longer.

One person who seems to be having fun with this process is Texas Tribune illustrator Todd Wiseman. Here are some of his variations on a theme:

Tunisian Election Irregularities

Tunisians voted this weekend for the first time since their revolution. I was hoping to find an election results map to see if there were any regional patterns to the vote but the results are not all in yet. What I was able to dig up was this interactive map of voting irregularities from ISIE, Tunisia's independent election commission.

 While it looks numerous, many of the irregularities are fairly benign acts like tearing down posters, not entering the voting booth in isolation, and using the flag-whatever that means. The violence and threat categories are either mostly empty or some data is missing. In fact, many of the categories are fairly empty. The above map shows all incidents. The map below shows "violation of silence" if my bad French comprehension is accurate. I chose this category because there are lots of incidents. The violence and corruption maps are pretty boring by contrast.

As you zoom in, the larger circles spread out to show more precise locations.

You can also change the basemap. I switched from the default aerial view because I find the street map easier to read. The only problem is the highway markers start to look like incidents.

If I find an interesting election results map I will put it in a future post.