Map displaying ‘likely’ and ‘super’ voters by division.

Here at Azavea we’ve been talking about CNN’s Magic Wall, a tour de force in election information visualization. With nerdy glee, correspondent John King brings to viewers the spatial drama of the presidential race, sweeping his hands across the Magic Wall (an oversized monitor powered by dozens of live data feeds) to highlight swing states, break down demographic data, and tabulate possible combinations of electoral votes.

For the past few years, we’ve been hard at work developing our own election tools and services, albeit on a smaller scale and with a focus on state and local elections. But our mission is grand: put the power of GIS and mapping into the hands of voters, grassroots campaign workers, and watchdog organizations.

Map displaying dispersment of campaign contribution sources to a state legislator.

Cicero , Azavea’s legislative district boundary and elected official web API, is a field guide to the geography of democracy. Cicero connects citizens to their local, state, and national representatives by tapping into a massive database of voting district maps and information about politicians, legislative bodies, and election events. The Cicero database has launched dozens of projects designed to help voters understand our current political landscape, including a study of gerrymandering in the United States, an analysis of in-district vs. out-of-district campaign donations, an election day lookup tool that provides users with constantly updated vote tallys, and Comcast’s Your Local Politics website.

To help grassroots campaigns hit the ground running, we’ve developed tools to quickly generate hundreds of canvassing maps that pinpoint likely voters and supervoters in each precinct. We’ve used our DecisionTree web-based geographic planning and prioritization tool to build a prototype Elections and Advocacy application to enable campaigns to prioritize canvassing and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts based on a selection of over 30 weighted electoral indicators including voting history, demographic data, and civic participation.

Map of election-day incidents that occurred in Philadelphia during the April 2008 primaries.

This November, we will continue to work with the Committee of Seventy, one of the oldest non-partisan political watchdog groups in the U.S., tracking election-day incidents – everything from voter intimidation to faulty equipment – at polling places throughout Philadelphia County. We launched this project last year during the mayoral race using PDF maps that were updated throughout the day. This year we built a real-time interactive web application that displays maps of election incidents as they are reported on screens at Committee of Seventy headquarters – our own version of a magic wall, if you will.