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Google Election Results

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147 pointsfjordan42 comments

The NYT (and other news sites...check out the Chicago Tribune's clean map http://elections.chicagotribune.com/results/us-president/)...win hands down in looks and functionality, in such a way that you wonder why Google even tried. They don't appear to have more up-to-date info either.

They might have a different source of data but that isn't at all communicated in this format. There must be other, niftier ways to present the data (results and any other kind of data) and chronological structure of our election day than just a map.

That said, I hope Google continues to be a real competitor in terms of providing the voting results data.

CT's map is a lot cleaner but it doesn't have the county by county maps that Google does.

The county maps have coloring errors. When I checked Oregon, most of the rural counties voted red but are colored blue.

Ouch. That would be my bug. Fixed now, with my sincere apology and thanks for reporting it.

https://code.google.com/p/election-maps/source/detail?r=4975...

This table of calls by network is a nice display of information as well: http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/results/president/network-...

Edit: It looks to be down at the moment.

I like HuffPo the best: http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/2012/results/senate

NYT is starting to stutter.

Agreed the NYT is a clear winner, but lets wait a couple of hours for the West coast results to start kicking in, lets see how they handle the load, its just nice go have google as a backup.

Looks like NYT and the Chicago Trib left off Gary Johnson and the other 3rd-party candidates, while Google included them. Props to Google for doing that. Gary Johnson did well, too.

It's really frustrating that most of these maps don't even mention third-party candidates. Even though Google include some information, it still only shows the top 3 candidates per district. So, I can't, for instance, see how much of the vote Jill Stein got in her "hottest" district in Illinois because Gary Johnson got more votes than her. But, like you said, at least they acknowledge they exist.

Pretty much the only good source of data is the AP, because they have tons of reporters on the ground who can report precincts as they are called in. This is really important for states that aren't good about updating their official counts on the web.

I like The New York Times coverage more: http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/results/president/big-boar... - I think it's more visually appealing and also more functional.

I'm not American, but visually I like this one http://edition.cnn.com/election/2012/results/main?hpt=elec_f...

The Huffington Post is good too: http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/2012/results

Weird that Bing has an huge ad on the NYT site, for a site with essentially the same content.

I wonder what clickthrough they get. Maybe a lot, as everyone opens 10 different tabs to cycle through sites and get higher throughput on updates.

Why do they count a state as having been won by a candidate after only 5%, 10%, or even 25% of the total precincts are reported? That cannot possibly have given a candidate the 51% they need to carry the state.

Because history and polls essentially show that the other candidate winning that state is impossible. They wait until voting closes in that state before calling it as a courtesy. The majority of states could have been called weeks in advance.

There are only 9 states that are actually in question (the battleground states). All the others are known well in advance.

They pretend they don't know till the polls close, but it's just to avoid discouraging voters.

Load this: http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/results/president/scenario... and mark the 9 states as they call them, and you'll know who won.

Annoyingly, that site now redirects to results reporting.

Or only on mobile?

Only on mobile. On the desktop it includes the current results but is still basically the decision tree. However, it doesn't let you choose the states that are already decided. (New Hampshire at the moment).

Bing has the same: http://www.bing.com/elections/

Yeah Spiderman uses Bing, we should too.

I am really annoyed to see many of these pages calling states for a candidate with 0% of votes in.

Can't we at least wait until a statistically valid sample of actual votes is in?

They do. They just round down from 0.4% in the summary. When 3600 of 4000 people vote one way, across several precints, it is statistically significant. You won't see that in a statr like Florida that has less consistency across precincts, but in NH and DC, it is a valid call.

I don't think that's what's going on. Once polls close, early vote totals are available. Those aren't counted in the percent of precincts reporting. That means there can be zero percent of precincts reporting, but 25% of the vote counted already.

Wow, surprisingly Google appear to be quite behind in terms of tallying up the votes. The Huffington Post amongst others appear to have way more up-to-date information: http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/2012/results, disappointing on Google's part.

They're using AP's numbers. I dodn't know why they don't just scrape the state govt websites, which are where all the news orgs are getting their data anyway.

Yeah, I was surprised Virgina was in red for the longest time in Google's result, while all indicators had it gone blue.

Politico seems to have more current information: http://www.politico.com/2012-election/map/#/President/2012/

According to the current total vote count I see on both, Google is more up to date by a few thousand votes.

Odd. A spot check of a few states is showing a much higher vote count in Politico's graph.

Odd indeed. I suppose the actual count and timing doesn't matter so much when they call most of the states with only 1% reporting.

I dig the InTrade page: http://www.intrade.com/v4/misc/electoral-map/

NPR had a really nice results dashboard also: http://election2012.npr.org/

WSJ.com had great looking coverage, but their flash (I think - didn't check) seems to be broken and their map is unusable under load. PBS has the best commentary IMHO, but their website crashed early under load.

More first-past-the-post foolishness: Obama got 50.3% of the popular vote but 59.9% of the electoral college vote, while Romney got 48.2% of the popular vote but 40.5% of the electoral college vote.

In the last Canadian federal election, we gave one party a majority government even though they only won 39.62% of the popular vote. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_federal_election,_2011

Absolutely. I'm also Canadian, and therefore sensitized to the issues surrounding FPTP. So far, Canada has somehow resisted the tendency toward a partisan duopoly, but that's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it means you can actually choose to vote for a progressive party, a moderate party or a conservative party (or a regional party). On the other, it means we get lots of bizarre artifacts, e.g. the 2008 election, in which the NDP had 18% of the vote but only 12% of the seats, while the BQ had 10% of the votes but 17% of the seats.

BBC is my favorite: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-20009195

Yahoo! http://news.yahoo.com/control-room/

Regarding Google News real-time coverage, they should call it near-real-time coverage.

...and so, with the way it's going... can we make a decent estimate of the victor?

I just get a box under results saying 'access not allowed'. Anyone else?

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