Simon Willison’s Weblog

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9 items tagged “elections”

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.

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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. # 6th November 2020, 2:24 pm

2009

Dealing with election results data. Alf Eaton loaded the Guardian’s European election results spreadsheet in to Google’s new Fusion Tables tool. # 12th June 2009, 6:06 pm

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. # 11th June 2009, 11:37 am

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. # 3rd November 2008, 8:40 pm

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”. # 2nd July 2008, 10:36 am

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. # 8th February 2008, 11:17 am

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. # 25th November 2007, 10:05 pm

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.

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