Votos y cifras

Electioneering has started in Spain for municipal and regional elections which are to be held on May 22nd. To coincide with the campaign, Esri's Spanish office has put together an interesting map called Votos y Cifras (votes and figures) which combines different sources of data to map voting patterns by region against socio-economic data for each area.

It is possible to embed the map in a web page as I have done here but to see the data you really need to go to the full size map.

You can choose from a variety of different backgrounds, including Open Street Map or satellite imagery. Selecting on the map will give you the current political composition for the municipality where you made the selection together with information on the structure of the population. Zoom out a bit and select the map showing the concentration of votes for the different political parties and you quickly get an idea of differences in the national distribution of these votes. This can be compared with data on income or the origin of the local population.

Votos y Cifras also includes an option to map social networking activity connected with the elections from Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. The Twitter option allows you to change the tweets displayed to match a set of Twitter id's or hashtags. I guess the small number of entries displayed from Twitter is a reflection of the still low usage of the location option which enables positioning of the messages.

This is a good example of how to use GIS technology on the web to make data available in a way that is easy to comprehend and use. You normally need a whole supplement in a newspaper to explain what you can find out with a few minutes navigation on this map. It will be interesting to see whether Esri extends this map to include the new results that we will get on May 22nd.