Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Voting methods
Speaking of high tech voting programs, such as the one used in the Venezuelan recall election, lets take a look at the United states and how we vote. Voting methods got lots of thought after the last presidential election when lots of people found they had voted wrongly because of what they perceived was a flawed system. Then there was the hanging chad thing. My opinion is that we should all go back to the big ugly lever system voting machine with curtain and all. No more voting from home. Come on down and participate like a good American.
Here is some data from Election Data Services showing stats on total usage of methods over the country as a whole. I was excited to see that there are still places that use the old mechanical lever systems. Election Data Services has maps of election methods and the results of the last several elections, but they are printed, and they charge for them.
ESRI (GIS software company) has both a voting method map and the result of the 2000 elections map by county. The interface to view them is a little cumbersome. Note how few states have only one method.

I also found one on USA Today but it's way out of date. 2001 I believe.
I generally don't like "prediction" maps, but this one is a good example of a thematic map where the polygons size reflects some value. Princeton University put this up. The states size is proportional to the number of electoral votes.

In other news, Boulder Colorado decided to replace its punch card voting system with an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper with the candidates listed, and told to fill in the boxes with a ball point pen.
I also found this groovy picture of Bush on Corporatism.tripod.com while I was looking for maps:

People are so creative.

No comments: