Code for South Africa built the Mail & Guardian's 2014 General Elections Map (http://mg.co.za/data/2014-05-07-live-elections-2014-results). In this talk by Jason Norwood-Young, first given to the Hacks/Hackers group in Cape Town on 30 May 2014, he discusses the trials, tribulations, and more trials of building an elections map.

1. How to (not) build an
election map
Jason Norwood-Young
Code4SA
jason@code4sa.org

2. Code4SA
“Everyone has the right of access to any information
held by the state; and any information that is held by
another person and that is required for the exercise
or protection of any rights.”
South African Constitution (Section 32)
http://code4sa.org

3. Elections 2009

7. Then, in 2012…

9. 2014
HTML Data Mobile
2009
Flash Multimedia Web

13. News24
• 1.7 Million Unique Users
• 22 Million Page Views
• 30,000 app downloads
• 102,000 concurrent users
• … just on the day after the elections
source: http://www.bandwidthblog.com/

14. Mail & Guardian
• Map accounted for 10% of traffic
• 5,000 concurrent users on the map
• 22,674 unique users
• 54,475 sessions
• 85,668 pageviews
• Avg session duration: 9m29s
source: Google Analytics, TechCentral

20. That’s nice, but I thought this was about maps, not statistics

21. Data Information
Presentation Knowledge

22. First, the APIs

25. Mix in a bit of inspiration
http://afrith.github.io/election-web

26. Start visualising

27. Our first look - all the provinces, municipalities, wards

28. Adding some color

29. Pulling back a bit

30. Mario Maps!

31. Fighting with the maps

32. Large parts of the country don’t have wards (2009)

33. EC Ward in KZN? WTF

34. That’s okay EC, have some KZN islands

35. Fighting with the IEC

36. Contacting the IEC
(This isn’t a link - it’s
an IMAGE)

37. At least we had plenty of time for testing…

38. east we got the API documentation in g
Election day: Wednesday 7 May 2014

39. we had known about the FRICKING MYSQL REPLICATION OP

40. Voting Day

41. May 7, 10:16am

42. • 7am - 2pm
• Throw out 2009 Wards maps
• Throw out seat allocation graphic
• Add names to map
• Add party flags
• 2pm - 3pm
• Vote
• 3pm - 6pm
• Final fixes to map
• 6pm - 7pm
• Rest, dinner
• 7pm - 9pm
• Integrate with IEC API
• 9pm - 5:54am
• PANIC!!!!
• 5:54am - 10am
• Sleep
• 10am onwards
• PANIC some more

43. Fun on the day
• IEC API reports that a Voting District has changed (pull,
not push)
• We fetch the changed VD
• We fetch the changed Munic (No ward data available)
• We fetch the changed Province
• Have to do this for Provincial and National
• Takes approximately 4 seconds for one result

44. 4 (seconds) * 22,000 (voting districts) * 2 (provincial, national) =
176,000 seconds
or
2,933 minutes
or
49 hours

45. Meanwhile, IEC is giving us bullshit data
which means we’re giving bullshit data

46. At 12pm on 8 May
I decided to turn off ward reporting

48. But a few days later
(Thanks to Adrian Frith who quickly scraped the data)

49. Wards are back, baby!

50. And now we have Voting Districts!

52. So who did the best maps?
• Media24 had the most up-to-date, accurate data
• We had the coolest
• Adrian Frith had the awesomest (and continues to
do the most with the maps)
• Everyone else kinda sucked

53. http://adrianfrith.com/

54. Lessons
• Data accuracy should come first, second and
third
• Don’t trust the data
• Check, double-check, triple-check, and then get
someone else to check
• I’m too old for all-nighters

55. What’re the 2016 Elections
going to look like?
• Mobile
• Waaay more data
• A more sophisticated, data-literate reader
• They’re maps, Jim, but not as we know it…

57. Tech Stack
• Code4SA Elections API
• Python (Flask)
• http://election-api.code4sa.org/
• Interface to IEC API
• Node.js
• Middleware btw Code4SA API and IEC API interface
• Python (Flask)
• Maps API
• Node.js, Topojson, Restify
• Front end
• D3.js
• Bootstrap 3
• CodeKit

58. Embed your own
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://election-map.code4sa.org/res
<div id="Code4SA" style="height: 100px"></div>
<script src="http://election-map.code4sa.org/code4sa-ck.js" typ
<script>Code4SA.Map.deploy();</script>

59. But was it worth it?

60. Yes, but only because
of the APIs
http://maps.code4sa.org/
http://election-api.code4sa.org/

61. – Emma Goldman
“If voting changed anything, they’d make it
illegal.”