Introducing new interactive booth maps

As we head into the election I’ve been busily posting election guides – about 63 have now been posted, with the remainder due over the course of the next month. This has meant I haven’t done as much blogging although I have had a number of articles in the Guardian Australia summarising the election in Queensland and South Australia.

I wanted to draw readers’ attention to a new innovation in my guides. I’ve just started making booth maps in CartoDB instead of Google Earth, which should allow me to post them as interactive maps, allowing readers to scroll around, zoom in, look at the vote at individual booths and see what towns are in particular parts of the seat.

Here’s an example of a map I produced for the seat of Mayo. This map shows the Xenophon team’s Senate vote in Mayo booths at the 2013 federal election.

So far I’ve only done this for one seat: Mayo. It’s the only reasonably interesting seat which I hadn’t already done the map for. I’m planning to use this method for the last twenty maps I’m yet to make for this election, and then roll out the technique for future elections.

Unfortunately most of those seats on that list are pretty boring – they’re mostly safe Liberal seats in Victoria, WA and South Australia, along with a couple of almost-marginal Labor seats in Melbourne. I may update my maps to the new method for a few key marginals once the guide is finished, or if they’re useful for a Guardian story, but unfortunately this is a work in progress.

In the meantime if you have feedback on how to make these easier to use please let me know in the comments of this post – please leave the Mayo guide for talking about Mayo.

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