Articles
Projects walkthroughs, tool teardowns, interviews, and more.
Articles tagged: elections
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Fact-checking in 2024? Five tools to help with research and promotion
By Erica Ryan
Posted onNewsrooms often devote more time to fact-checking during election season—for good reason! These tools can make the most of yours.
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It’s time to rethink how we report election results
By Thomas Wilburn
Posted onWe need to fundamentally rethink the ways we report election results. Many of our maps and practices—from early calls to “trends” in vote share on election night—are confusing if not outright deceptive. The question isn’t “how do we optimize for speed, accuracy, and volume?”, it’s “how do we make sure our practices improve democracy instead of just observing it.”
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Introducing Civic: Elections Data Management from POLITICO
By Tyler Fisher
Posted onA walkthrough of our system to manage election data, plus how you can help us build it.
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Same Diff: The English-Language Press Maps the French Election
By David Yanofsky
Posted onHere’s a reminder: In normal times, US-based publications normally don’t put much effort into visualizing foreign elections. Of course, with presidency of Donald Trump, a British vote to leave the European Union, and a presidential election in France without either of the mainstream political parties qualifying, we don’t live in normal times.
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How (and Why) ProPublica Got Into the Elections Game
By Lena Groeger, Erin Kissane, Scott Klein, Ken Schwencke, and Derek Willis
Posted onYesterday morning, ProPublica announced two new projects: Electionland, a large-scale intiative to report on voting access and problems in the upcoming US elections, and Election DataBot, a comprehensive election-info data tracker and feed.
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Animated Spray-Painting Candidates at the Guardian US
By Kenan Davis, Rich Harris, Nadja Popovich, and Kenton Powell
Posted onOver the course of the 2016 US election season, we’ll be highlighting plenty of hardworking projects designed to make elections coverage better for all—like elex and OpenElections—but also the offbeat, playful, and experimental approaches that newsrooms can work on when the basics are under control. Our first entry in the series comes from the Guardian US interactive team, who took a moment to break down their animated results maps that debuted in last week’s Nevada caucuses and South Carolina primary.
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Draw Your Own Election Adventure
By Juan Elosua
Posted onAt La Nación, we have been working on real-time coverage of Buenos Aires elections, as well as a more detailed view results once we get data for each polling station. In this post, we’ll to explain our mapping-app innovation that allows readers to choose what parts of the city they are interested in by drawing shapes over a basemap, and then returns custom results for their selected area.
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Thank You, Electionbot
By Jacob Harris
Posted onOffloading some of a burden of continuous human monitoring to a friendly bot can be just the comfort you need on a cold Election Night.
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Scraping Nevada
By Derek Willis
Posted onDerek Willis breaks down the three stages of scraping (denial, annoyance, and acceptance) while confronting the election-results form from hell.
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Introducing Clarify
By Geoff Hing and Derek Willis
Posted onAn open source elections-data URL locator and parser for Clarity Elections results, from the team at OpenElections.
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Introducing MinnPost’s Election Night API
By Tom Nehil and Alan Palazzolo
Posted onThe Election Night API is a set of tools, configurations, and instructions to collect and serve election results on election night, while still providing an off-season service, and focusing on saving resources as much as possible.
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Introducing Wherewolf
By Noah Veltman and Jenny Ye
Posted onLast week, as part of the OpenNews post-election Code Convening, Jenny Ye and Noah Veltman put the finishing touches on Wherewolf, a JavaScript library that lets you run a boundary service in a browser.
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Stealing the NPR App Template for Fun and (Non-)Profit
By Kaeti Hinck, Denise Malan, Ryan Nagle, and Adam Schweigert
Posted onThis month, just in time for the election, our team at the Investigative News Network (INN) launched Power Players—a state-by-state exploration of campaign finance and top political donors across the country. Here’s how we used NPR’s App Template to make it work.
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US Elections Roundup, November 2013
By Erin Kissane
Posted onA light round of elections were held this week in the US, giving news developers an opportunity to outdo their usual coverage. We’ve rounded up a few highlights.
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Watching the Results Change
By Jacob Harris
Posted onJacob Harris on the challenges of reporting and calling elections and the making of the NYT’s chart of minute-by-minute Virginia governor’s race reporting action.
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The New York Times’ Election Results Loader
By Jacob Harris
Posted onJacob Harris breaks down the data, the code choices, and the rationales behind the NYT’s results loader for the US 2012 elections.
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Mother Jones’ Voter Suppression Map
By Tasneem Raja
Posted onHow the Mother Jones nerd desk whipped up a multi-layered map of verified incidents of voter suppression for the 2012 US elections.
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The NYT’s Visual Election Outcome Explorer
By Mike Bostock
Posted onMike Bostock explains how he and Shan Carter created the 512 Paths interactive feature, from early sketches to complete implementation.
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WYNC & KPCC’s California Elections Map
By John Keefe
Posted onHow the WNYC data team turned California’s live elections data into an embeddable map based on a