11 items tagged “elections”
2024
Follow the Crypto (via) Very smart new site from Molly White tracking the huge increase in activity from Cryptocurrency-focused PACs this year. These PACs have already raised $203 million and spent $38 million influencing US elections in 2024.
Right now Molly's rankings show that the "Fairshake" cryptocurrency PAC is second only to the Trump-supporting "Make America Great Again Inc" in money raised by Super PACs this year - though it's 9th in the list that includes other types of PAC.
Molly's data comes from the FEC, and the code behind the site is all open source.
There's lots more about the project in the latest edition of Molly's newsletter:
Did you know that the cryptocurrency industry has spent more on 2024 elections in the United States than the oil industry? More than the pharmaceutical industry?
In fact, the cryptocurrency industry has spent more on 2024 elections than the entire energy sector and the entire health sector. Those industries, both worth hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars, are being outspent by an industry that, even by generous estimates, is worth less than $20 billion.
UK Parliament election results, now with Datasette. The House of Commons Library maintains a website of UK parliamentary election results data, currently listing 2010 through 2019 and with 2024 results coming soon.
The site itself is a Rails and PostgreSQL app, but I was delighted to learn today that they're also running a Datasette instance with the election results data, linked to from their homepage!
The raw data is also available as CSV files in their GitHub repository. Here's their Datasette configuration, which includes a copy of their SQLite database.
2020
Weeknotes: sqlite-utils 3.0 alpha, Git scraping in the zeitgeist
Natalie and I decided to escape San Francisco for election week, and have been holed up in Fort Bragg on the Northern California coast. I’ve mostly been on vacation, but I did find time to make some significant changes to sqlite-utils. Plus notes on an exciting Git scraping project.
[... 603 words]nyt-2020-election-scraper. Brilliant application of git scraping by Alex Gaynor and a growing team of contributors. Takes a JSON snapshot of the NYT’s latest election poll figures every five minutes, then runs a Python script to iterate through the history and build an HTML page showing the trends, including what percentage of the remaining votes each candidate needs to win each state. This is the perfect case study in why it can be useful to take a “snapshot if the world right now” data source and turn it into a git revision history over time.
2009
Dealing with election results data. Alf Eaton loaded the Guardian’s European election results spreadsheet in to Google’s new Fusion Tables tool.
Exactly how well did the BNP do where you live? Guardian journalists spent a day and a half calling round different local authorities to get a proper breakdown of the European election results (which are only officially published in aggregate) and published the results as a spreadsheet on the Datablog.
2008
Obama v McCain—battleground graph (via) Paul Crowley provides the smartest election visualisation I’ve seen this cycle, using the current projections from fivethirtyeight.com and with a promise of a frequently updated version as the actual results roll in.
ORG verdict on London Elections: “Insufficient evidence” to declare confidence in results. Electronic voting strikes again. Also of interest: the audit conducted by KPMG can’t be published due to “commercial confidentiality”.
LJWorld.com: Kansas Democratic Presidential Caucuses (via) The most beautiful election results page I’ve ever seen. Love the typography and the Google Charts integration.
2007
Open Rights Group: Our first two years. ORG’s review of the past two years shows just how worthwhile a cause they have become—highlights include their hugely successful campaign against copyright term extension and their involvement in this year’s e-voting trials.
2004
Election endorsements
My ex-colleague Jacob Kaplan-Moss has put together a fantastic site listing the presidential endorsements published by American newspapers in the run up to the election. I was looking for something like this just the other day so it was great to find the answer so close to home. I was depressed but not at all surprised to see my former employer endorse Bush, but it’s interesting to see that of the four Kansan papers listed two endorsed Kerry, despite that state’s huge Republican majority.