Electoral Analysis

Example Map
Example Analysis

Inspiration

In light of the recent election, we were curious to see how much of a say people really had when voting for their president. We also wanted to see how racial demographics in a state would also play into the electoral college and tried to find any underlying (or not) prejudices in the electoral college.

What it does

Our product is an interactive website that displays the maps we produced in javascript, and also has an analysis accompanying it that draws conclusions from the data.

How we built it

We first used Jupyter notebooks to do the initial analysis and find patterns and then used javascript to make the interactive portions and display the analysis in a nicer way.

Challenges we ran into

The main issue we had was working with Jupyter since we weren't very used to using it and its syntax. Also installing the necessary packages (some of which were very picky with windows) proved to be more difficult than expected.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Making an interactive website, as well as doing data analysis in a practical manner.

What we learned

A lot of Jupyter syntax, as well as front-end/back-end development.

What's next for Electoral Analysis

Using more historical data to see how demographics, and therefore voting power, have changed over time.

Built With

Created by

I worked on the overall maps as well as front/back-end

Private user
Worked on the display of the map for the electoral college

Ethan Suleman
I developed both the backend and the frontend. For the backend, I used ExpressJS framework to host our Restful API so the frontend can make a HTTP request (using Ajax) to the server to get electoral information collected and analyzed by the other members. For frontend, I used Simplemaps service to get a map of all 50 U.S. states. Moreover, I also utilized Bootstrap library to make the website look better and more responsive. Deployed the website on Heroku platform and setup CNAME to point to our custom domain

Tung Dao
I was the architect for the idea of measuring electoral college votes and racial demographics for this project. I also was in charge of the data processing, I searched the web for certain files with data we wanted and utilized Pandas to centralize all our data into a single CSV. I also created the initial maps with Matplotlib and came up with the color-scheme and direction of the website.

Aref Malek