Project description:

This interactive map shows the results of nationwide elections for each of the 9304 ballot boxes in The Netherlands and lets the user zoom in on political parties or localities to find specific patterns and stories. In the past, the election results were only being published at the level of entire municipalities and it took us two weeks to manually collect all of the ballot box results, in a joint effort with the Open State Foundation and Pointer. 

Impact reached:

Our efforts revealed the lack of nationwide standards and how hard it is to come by the detailed election results in the first place. As a result, the Dutch government now requires a standardized publication of all the ballot box results for future elections.

Techniques/technologies used:

We used R and python for data acquisition and analysis and mapbox and D3.js for the interactive map.

What was the hardest part of this project?

The hardest part was to gather all of the ballot box results from every single municipality in a similar format.

What can others learn from this project?

Faulty standard practices can change for the better if you show interest in having proper access to the data.

Project links:

www.volkskrant.nl/kijkverder/2019/stembureaus/index.html#/