Slashgeo

Here are some of the entries I found regarding the Canadian election. The GISuser weblog offers a lot of links. The Cartography blog generated its own maps. Of course, the official site is also a good starting point.

Slashdot covers 2006 U.S. election maps mashups. Their summary: ""Search Engine Watch has an article on the launch this week of map-based search tools to follow the 2006 Congressional elections, from both Google Earth and the map-based real estate site HotPads.com. The Google Earth Blog notes the release of two election-oriented layers outlining the borders of the congressional districts and linking to Google News articles related to the different races. And HotPads is offering the 2006 Election Edition. From their blog: 'The 435 congressional districts are outlined on HotPads Maps, with red and blue designating the party affiliation of the districts' current Representatives. By clicking on the districts' "I" buttons..., users can view quick facts about the districts including the current Representatives and the candidates in November's contests. By clicking on the quick facts bubble, users can get more detailed information [from] Wikipedia articles with detailed information about the candidates and the close races.'""

Michael Muskovin writes "Ottawa County GIS and the Ottawa County Clerk have collaborated to develop an Internet mapping application for publication of real-time election results. Utilizing ES&S voting machines and software recently purchased through a grant by the Help America Vote Act of 2002, data is manipulated by the GIS Department for display to the public. With this new system, news media and interested citizens have the ability to immediately view election results as they are received by the clerk’s office. Decreasing the time from data acquisition to data dissemination is the largest benefit of this application. In addition, users can more easily identify results because of the visual representation of formerly textual data." From a comment on Spatially Adjusted, there's a link to Pollster flash maps. More maps from the Geospatial Semantic Web Blog. And why not the real-time reporting of voting problems.

The Very Spatial blog links to a newly launched electoral geography website. From the VS entry: "There’s a LOT of good data there for anyone doing anything with elections around the world. They seem to be following a “beg, borrow, or steal” philosophy as far as the data (which I wholly support!), so you might have to do a little massaging to get into a form you can easily use for analysis."

The Google Earth Blog details the French presidential election results in Google Earth. From the blog: "The layer now shows the election data for the whole country on who voted for Sarkozky verses Royal broken down by department and even down to the town level from May 6th. The placemarks show who voted for which candidate, and provide more detailed statistics. Zoom in and tilt your view for more details [...]"

Very Spatial and other blogs links to interactive maps about campaign contributions for the U.S. 2008 election [warning, it seems the maps don't work with Firefox]. From this article (including screenshots): "Being the FEC, the map is also not without bureaucratic guidelines. It only includes itemized individual contributions; PAC money or donations under $200 are not reported; and primary and general funds are not separated. Also, money transferred from cong. to WH accounts will be attributed to the state where the cong. cmte was registered -- So, all the “SEN” money that HRC raised from 22101 or 90210 is recorded as contributions out of NY State." See related stories below.

Slashdot discuss a new redistricting game which allow you to see the effects to districts on election results. Their summary: ""This is a cool redistricting game that was launched out of the capitol building in Washington DC last week. It was created by the USC Game Innovation Lab and has been getting lots of press. It's about time someone took on a tough issue like redistricting reform using the power of the internet." It's crazy that gerrymandering is actually good fodder for a video game."

The Data Libre blog runs a nice entry on Ontario's elections results: "From a data, information and news perspective democracy won out. The MMP issue lost out however as the public education component was near nil! Wonder who got the communication’s contract for that one! Yikes!"

Here's this weekend's Australian election results in Google Earth and an interactive election map: "The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is covering today's election live using Google Earth. Simply download this network link. [...] The ABC also has an interactive election map (using Google Maps) with more details. Googlers in Australia also created an election website a few weeks ago which provides background information on the election with a Google Maps mashup and also YouTube videos on the candidates." See also related stories below.

Here's a bunch of geonews related to Google Earth / Maps. First is unveiling of a collection of tools and databases based on Google Earth for the state of Alabama, named Virtual Alabama: "The department worked with Google to use Google Earth technology as its primary means of visualizing an operational picture around the state. The same tool will be used by first responders, county planners, and other officials to get detailed geographic views overlayed with critical information." The GEB also discusses anthropogenic biomes and population density maps for GE. The official Google Lat Long blog shares a gadget for the U.S. 2008 presidential election. Ogle Earth describes the free EarthNC trip and route planner tool for Google Earth. Related stories copied below.

Arno Scharl writes "The ECOresearch Network has just released a geotagged news archive on the US Presidential Election 2008. The system gathers and annotates documents from blogs, environmental organizations, the Fortune 1000 and news media from the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand. Processing these sites yields more than 800,000 documents each week. The tightly coupled interface integrates geographic maps with information landscapes, ontology graphs and tag clouds to reveal both geographical and semantic relationships. Each visualization is implemented as a Web Map Service and displayed via OpenLayers. A 6-minute screencast demonstrates the major components. Besides geotagging the documents, the system provides weekly statistics on the US Election 2008. It identifies (i) attention by counting references to a candidate, (ii) sentiment towards a candidate by looking for co-occurring positive and negative expressions, (iii) keywords reflecting the most important topics associated with a candidate." See below other US elections 2008 stories.

From the GIS Development web site : "As the US presidential election season begins, the coming year promises a series of primaries, caucuses and straw polls, culminating in a general election in November. GIS and software development company to help geographically record, map, and analyze election day incidents in real-time, for the first time in the 103 years of Committee of Seventy. The primary challenge of incorporating GIS into this endeavor was to create a system that would enable both quick recording of incidents and real-time map generation." For the entire article see this web site : http://www.gisdevelopment.net/news/viewn.asp?id=GIS:N_wbpqhleozg

Yesterday was election day in the United States, several geoblogs links and discuss the various maps available online. Spatial Sustain shared numerous links, including the New York Times and Wired coverage, but also MSNBC interactive map, ABC News interactive map and Washington Post's detailed interactive map. The official Google Lat Long blog ran an entry on their special Google Maps, YouTube layers and Twitter updates. Very Spatial informs us about a BBC state-by-state map. All Points Blog links to an article on a multi-touch collaboration wall for the elections. And finally, DataLibre links to a map of the political blogosphere. See also previous stories below. I may add other sources below since I anticipate additional geoblog coverage in the coming days.