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November 19, 2016

The United States Electoral College | A Genius Representation of the People

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Unless you've been living under a rock, you will know that there was a Presidential election on November 8th. Confusing everyone was the fact that Donald Trump won the electoral vote, yet Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. This made me think, how does the Electoral College work and does it accurately represent the people?

This turned out to be a fantastic civic learning experience for me. And exploring the data with Tableau helped me understand how it all works. I know a lot of people, particularly those I work with in the U.K., that are confused by this election and how the popular candidate didn't win. To aid in this understanding, I've created this story points visualisation to explain how the electoral college works, how electoral votes are allocated, and how the election would have turned out if the electoral college was based strictly on population.

2 comments :

  1. Hi Andy,

    I hope this message finds you well. I was wondering how you made the cartogram itself? Did you have to do it manually typing in the locations of the states on an x-y axis into the spreadsheet? If I were to do the same for the UK how would I go about getting the hexagons to align like they have in your cartogram?

    Thankyou for your help.

    Kind regards,

    Thomas

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    Replies
    1. Thomas, it's an excel sheet that I blend to. You can download my workbook and unzip it to get the file. Or the file is on Matt Chambers' website. http://sirvizalot.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/hex-tile-maps-in-tableau.html

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