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Google Trends Electionland
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- riebschlager 10y agoObligatory. [1] [1] https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/
- ssharp 10y agoThat's not really happening here. As it is now, the upper-mid west through New England is hard to distinguish, but there is a lot of activity in North Carolina, an extremely important State to the Trump campaign.
- kens 10y agoWhy are xkcd mentions on HN always prefixed with Obligatory?
- TeMPOraL 10y agoBecause it's one of the Laws of the Internet that there is a relevant XKCD for every topic. The prefix "obligatory" means "it obviously should be here already, but for some reason it isn't". XKCDs are also sometimes prefixed with "relevant", for obvious reasons.
- TheCoreh 10y ago"Obligatory xkcd reference", based on the idea that there are so many xkcd comics, at least one of them will be relevant to any given thread.
- draugadrotten 10y agohttps://relevantxkcd.appspot.com/ https://relevantxkcd.appspot.com/
- morganvachon 10y agoIt's not so much about HN, it's a meme that's been around nearly as long as xkcd has. I recall seeing "Obligatory xkcd" on Fark.com as far back as 2007 or so. I've also seen it on Reddit and similar forums over the years; hell I've even seen it in Usenet discussions.
- throwanem 10y ago> nearly as long as xkcd has It's been around a lot longer than that; I first saw it in version 3.0.0 of esr's Jargon File, which was released in 1993, and I doubt it was newly added then.
- morganvachon 10y agoWell, I was referring specifically to the use of "obligatory/relevant xkcd", not the use of "obligatory/relevant" period. :-)
- throwanem 10y agoFair. Seems like that's always #927, though, at least around here...
- jeffwass 10y agoPrior to xkcd, I recall seeing Obligatory Simpsons Quotes on either usenet or slashdot back in the late 90's.
- timdierks 10y agoThis is pretty, but it's all statistical outliers; every highlighted spot is a small city where random fluctuations above a low baseline are most likely to generate seemingly-impressive spikes in query volume.
- anonymoushn 10y agolike Austin, Phoenix, and San Francisco?
- mbesto 10y agoHere's what I wanna know - what has been the increase (or decrease) in voter intimidation this year versus 2012.
- protomyth 10y agoI'm a bit peeved polls didn't open until 9AM in New Rockford ND when the state (and a fair number of farmers) said they would open at 7AM. Wonder what that would be on Google's chart.
- ma2rten 10y ago"Long Wait Times"?
- protomyth 10y agoI suppose two hours could be considered that. Its still harvest for a lot of these folks so this is a not good thing. Lot of farmers were getting a full mad on as I went back to my car. I'm not very fond of being late to work, but I would not have made it back in time tonight.
- jplahn 10y agoA 100% increase in searches for "voter intimidation" in my city (Seattle) is interesting. I'd love additional context on who is searching for that (i.e. is it the intimidators or the fearful?) Nonetheless, this seems like the beginning of an interesting tool. What would it take to do some sort of fuzzy matching on related searches, like broken voting machines for voting machine problems? I suppose you could wait for a related term to breach a threshold and begin tracking it with related terms.
- deckiedan 10y agoIt could also be people who had a /wonderful/ easy voting experience, and heard from some guy who reads HN that 'voter intimidation' was a trending search term, so decided to search and see what the fuss was about...
- pc86 10y agoThis greatly overestimates the importance of HN as a source of news.
- perfectfire 10y agoI'm pretty sure he meant HN as a just an example. You could easily replace HN with reddit or HuffPo or CNN or [name of some political blog].
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ComteDeLaFere 10y agoBurlington, PA has been the biggest red dot on the map for the past 20 minutes or so. That's another story I'd like to learn about.
- girzel 10y agoGiven that Washington State is all mail-in, I doubt we're seeing a lot of actual voter intimidation! I'm also in Seattle, and dropped my ballot off at one of three drop-off points. There were some nice people in smocks there who thanked me for voting.
- yotamoron 10y agoSo cool.
- throwawayReply 10y agoI wish this were normalized by electoral college size, it would go part-way to normalizing by population but also be normalized with respect to impact on outcome.
- josefresco 10y agoThere's also this: https://usaelectionmonitor.ushahidi.io/views/map https://usaelectionmonitor.ushahidi.io/views/map Article: http://qz.com/825442/kenyas-crisis-mapping-startup-ushahidi-will-monitor-the-us-presidential-election/ http://qz.com/825442/kenyas-crisis-mapping-startup-ushahidi-...
- ryanSrich 10y agoOn days like this I'm glad I live in Oregon. Honestly it's the only sane and responsible way to vote.
- Munksgaard 10y agoForgive my ignorance, but how do you vote in Oregon?
- ryanSrich 10y agoYou don't get the option to vote in person. We don't even have voter booths. Instead, the state mails you a voter guide and a ballot that you fill out in the convenience of your own home. This allows you to review the candidates and new proposed bills line by line. Once filled out you simply drop it off at one of the hundreds of drop-off locations and you're done (or mail it in if you have time). This can all be done weeks ahead of November 8th.
- AndrewOMartin 10y agoAnd what if an intimidating person in your household has strong opinions about how you should mark that ballot?
- ryanSrich 10y agoIf you can't find a single personal space to fill out a ballot then you have bigger problems.
- davidw 10y agoThere is always going to be some potential for that. "Take a picture of how you voted or I'll beat you" would work fine even with polling places, although it'd be a little trickier. The system saves a ton of money and time, and we have record numbers of voters in Oregon this year.
- 10y ago
- highCs 10y agoHow is measured intimidation?
- TheBiv 10y agoby searching "voter intimidation"
- tangue 10y agoGoogle did something similar for the flu without any significant result[0]. Did things improved ? [0] https://www.wired.com/2015/10/can-learn-epic-failure-google-flu-trends/ https://www.wired.com/2015/10/can-learn-epic-failure-google-...
- idm 10y agoSortof OT: I was also interested in election trends. While Google is focusing on real-time search trends regarding voting, I looked at meme trends leading up to the election. There are interesting trends in the amount of attention different candidate memes received over time. It will be interesting to see whether the attention received by candidates is translated into votes, today. Here's the working paper: http://iandennismiller.github.io/election-memes http://iandennismiller.github.io/election-memes EDIT: quick link to viz: http://imgur.com/S6nHNLT http://imgur.com/S6nHNLT
- nhebb 10y agoThey missed out on not including Reddit in the social networks. Reddit seemed like meme-central this election for Sanders and Trump.
- gmisra 10y agoAnd, all of the underlying data is available on Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/SIZZLE/2016electionmemes https://www.kaggle.com/SIZZLE/2016electionmemes
- idm 10y agoTotally - it's the first time I've messed with the platform and I can see some real value there!
- traskjd 10y agoWhat's the visualisation library they're using here? Looks great (I'm guessing D3, but it's hard to break through the webpack file to figure it out).
- deckar01 10y agoI don't see a link to the source code either. This was undoubtedly built on top of many open source projects, but I have no way to view the licenses and copyright notices.
- nthitz 10y agoReact + d3 + Canvas + More. Disclaimer: I helped build it.
- deckar01 10y agoYou might consider including the BSD licenses those projects were published under in your minified JavaScript file. Is this project's source code published anywhere?
- freehunter 10y agoAs someone who is not a developer and doesn't know that much about open source licenses, is this something you have to do? If I built something using React, I have to publish their license with my code? If I build something with Javascript, do I have to publish their license as well? Do I have to tell everyone what technologies I've used to built my software, or...? That seems weird to me, but again I'm not a developer so I've never dealt with that. I've never released a license with my Bash scripts.
- deckar01 10y agoAttribution is the common requirement among most open source licenses [0]. Developers occasionally reference or link to the license, but the proper thing to do is to include the license in its entirety with the source code. > I've never released a license with my Bash scripts. You reserve all rights to your published works without stating otherwise. Developers would be wise to avoid redistributing unlicensed works without the written consent of the copyright holder(s). [0] https://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/open-source-101-licensing--cms-21279 https://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/open-source-101-licensin...
- NelsonMinar 10y agoIt's pretty but what is this really telling us? There's a 126% increase in searchers for "Voter intimidation" in Hoback, Wyoming. OK, so does that mean that someone's being intimidated? Planning to intimidate? Curious about the news? Does a "126% increase" mean there were 7 searches today instead of just 4?
- alistairSH 10y agoAnd increase since when? What's the baseline? I would expect most of these searches to increase in frequency on election day, even relative to SuperTuesday or 2012.
- listentojohan 10y agoGood points, I thought the same, but they actually address that if you click the logo (though it's just a possible explanation of how that data point might be explained): "FEARS OF VOTER INTIMIDATION KEEPING PEOPLE FROM THE POLLS We’ve had a lot of reports of people worried about going to the polls because of threats of voter intimidation. While the fears are real — and we certainly expect to see one-off issues of attempts at intimidating voters (like the Trump supporters will bull horns in West Palm Beach) — there is no evidence to suggest that an organized campaign to intimidate voters is underway. " [1] https://projects.propublica.org/electionland/ https://projects.propublica.org/electionland/
- nostromo 10y agoLike everything in politics, there's an ulterior motive to many of those reports. "They don't want YOU to be able to vote!" is a great way to get your people to vote.
- nostromo 10y agoIt's meaningless. Near Seattle there are trends reported for "voter intimidation" and "long wait times" and "voting machine problems." Those trends make no sense for a region that votes by mail.
- 10y ago
- lai 10y agoI like how Alaska is so chill.
- mangeletti 10y agoI just had to vote "provisional" myself (Palm Beach County). I have a feeling there is going to be a lot of fraud reports against the Florida Board of Elections. We registered almost 2 weeks before our Oct 11 deadline, yet neither my wife nor I were in their system - we received no mail or anything from the BoE. My vote, I'm absolutely certain now, will be thrown in the trash. Even if it isn't, the election will be over by the time it's "counted". Think I'm simply spreading FUD? Take a look at the 2004 Florida general election... this state's election board is wholly corrupted.
- biot 10y agoWhy isn't eligibility automatic? Whether state of federal, doesn't the government already know whether or not you qualify to vote?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Someone1234 10y agoThat would make rational sense, but strangely no. Unfortunately the US is setup in such a way so that individual states get to decide who is eligible to vote. This is a state right defined in the constitution[0]. In practice the vast majority of states have similar voting requirements. But because, in theory, they could all differ then no unified automated system is possible, it would have to be per-state. Of course individual states could create an automatic voter registration system, and I believe some have/do. But a lot of other states are actively trying to disenfranchise the poor, young, or minorities who would benefit the most from automatic registration. Ultimately voting and voter registration needs to be handled by a non-partisan organisation within states. But considering it would take partisan politicians to set up such a non-partisan organisation, it has little chance of happening. [0] http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/2014/08/constitution-check-who-decides-who-gets-to-vote/ http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/2014/08/constitution-chec...
- jimktrains2 10y ago
- joelthelion 10y agoIs this kind of realtime data publicly available in any form?
- jedberg 10y agoSo far all of these just look like population maps of the US, skewed by time zone. Basically if it's a heavily populated area that is awake, then the dots are big. Maybe as the day goes on it will level out to more interesting insights?
- partisan 10y agoA population density overlay would have been helpful as would a voting trend by state or even by municipality or district to understand if there are any statistically relevant discrepancies. That said, I suspect the point of this tool is to lower the barriers to voting to allow everyone's vote to be collected.
- bjonica 10y agoAlmost, but my very densely populated state of Massachusetts has barely any trending searches for "provisional ballot", and none in Boston; whereas the swingier state of Ohio awash with trending "Provisional Ballot" searches.
- vhost- 10y agoNothing in Oregon because we all sent our ballots in a week or two ago. Interesting viz to see.
- neals 10y agoI love the American elections! The data, the coverage, the websites, the data-driven-campaigning... all of it. I mean, I'm glad I don't live there and have to choose between these disasters of candidates and see either of them hand over the control of the world to Asia... but I do love the elections as a platform!
- AznHisoka 10y agoI just really want to know how many estimated ppl voted for each candidate in each state. Couldn't they just extrapolate that based on search/browsing history (IE. if someone visited BreitBart, they're probably voting for Trump, if someone visited 538, most likely Clinton)
- TallGuyShort 10y agoI would think that's extremely unreliable. If it was true, it would be really bad. I want to know what Trump and Clinton are saying regardless of who I vote for. I visit BreitBart but voted for relatively few Republicans. I think one of the main problems with our political process is that our news feeds are turning into echo chambers, polarizing everyone who doesn't go out of their way to really think critically and expand their horizons.
- avivo 10y agoThis is part of the larger Electionland project, involving over 1000 journalists & journalism students. https://projects.propublica.org/electionland/ https://projects.propublica.org/electionland/
- dmix 10y agoApparently a bunch of states (23?) are using a software system called Interstate Crosscheck to look for "double voters". > Election officials in more than two dozen states have compiled lists of citizens whom they allege could be registered in more than one state – thus potentially able to cast multiple ballots – and eligible to be purged from the voter rolls. The problem is that it often only uses a persons name as a singular data point. So if a person votes with the same first/last name as another person in another state, it's possible that vote could be wiped out. It was even matching names even though there were differences in middle names or had Jr/Sr at the end. The journalist, Greg Palast, who investigated this back in 2014 has been doing radio circuits again recently saying that it's still being used in a bunch of states. Not sure about the validity of this since there hasn't been much reporting elsewhere on this. He seems to be the only one talking about it. And googling 'Interstate Crosscheck' only brings up his articles and democrat superpac websites. http://projects.aljazeera.com/2014/double-voters/index.html http://projects.aljazeera.com/2014/double-voters/index.html http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/the-gops-stealth-war-against-voters-w435890 http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/the-gops-steal...
- BinaryIdiot 10y agoInteresting. I'm registered in 3 states (I always kinda assumed registering in a new state unregistered you in another) and my wife is registered in 2. I wonder if my name is on that list. Damn even the criteria they use doesn't technically have to be unique; it's possible to have the same name, DOB and last 4 digits of a SSN (though that's likely incredibly rare but still the possibility is theoretically there). I feel as if our entire election and voting process needs a `re-write`.
- dave_sullivan 10y agoYeah, that's nuts, there are 20 other people with my name just living in the bay area. That system could wipe out some non-zero percent of the Irish vote.
- drzaiusapelord 10y agoMerely last name and DOB brings up a fairly unique value. This is what Walgreens, and others, now use instead of SSN. There was an earlier HN item about how DOB, gender, and Zip identifies 87% of the US population uniquely. No SSN needed in either case. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2942967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2942967
- mastermachetier 10y agoThe UI on this app is spectacular actually . I want to sit down with the team that wrote it and just ask questions for days.
- dgritsko 10y agoThere's a decent chance some of them are reading this thread; what would you want to ask them?
- twhb 10y agoPerformance is poor on my older laptop. Maybe I'm getting to the point where web devs should leave me in the dust, but, it's also a shame to waste resources on newer systems. I suspect the problem is that it's built on React, which struggles with large data sets. If the team is reading this, I'd bring up a point made on the Netflix dev blog: the key to great React perf is doing the expensive stuff outside of React. Do it low-level, stitch it in with lifecycle callbacks. You can end up keeping most of your code in React's world, while fixing most of the performance problem.
- whybroke 10y agoParticularly intersting is the 'inactive voter status' band along the cotton belt (a region of African Americans in the southern sates where the voting rights act was recently repealed). Yet no such searches in KS, CO, NE, WY etc.
- guelo 10y agoThis would be more accurate and real-time if it were built on Twitter. Unfortunately, Twitter's API is a flaming mound of excrement.
- jordache 10y agoit looks like google wrote their own visualization js library?
- LeoPanthera 10y agoGeographic profile maps which are basically just population maps. https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/
- TallGuyShort 10y agoThis is cool, but seems to me to be very especially vulnerable to the Observer Effect. Any fluctuation in these search terms that shows up here will cause people to try and find out more by searching for those terms themselves. What may have started out as random noise gets fed through a feedback loop and amplified, while not necessarily being signal. I saw an increase in searches for voter intimidation near where I live. I immediately went to DuckDuckGo, and "!n voter intimidation". Now I'm part of the problem, apparently :)
- rewr 10y agoew
- rewr 10y agoew2q
- farright 10y agoWhile we're on the subject of voter intimidation, there has been constant intimidation of Trump supporters throughout this whole campaign[0]. And at the same time, Democrats had a deliberate campaign to incite Trump supporters to violence[1] although this required provoking them by infiltrating their private events, while Trump supporters were harassed and abused on the streets. Progressives have this insane argument that goes that violence and intimidation against Trump supporters is actually ok and not contrary to our deepest values, because it is done by private citizens and not the government. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUBpRexwiPg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUBpRexwiPg [1] http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/10/17/exclusive-okeefe-video-sting-exposes-bird-dogging-democrats-effort-to-incite-violence-at-trump-rallies/ http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/10/17/exclusive...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- zodPod 10y agoAs someone trying to inspect dots, it's very annoying to me that the detail windows pop up and can block other dots. I'm not sure how you'd stop this but I found this very clunky to use. I'm also not sure if it offers anything useful...
- meganvito 10y agoJust curious, for such a big system, how the quality of such a large service system is assured? Even just for a single state.