The 2008 presidential election is less than two weeks away! With the upcoming election day looming closer and record turnout for early voting, the media has focused heavily on the voting machines and methods used to vote. As many may recall, there has been numerous problems in recent elections with voter machines. On CNN last night I saw a story about voter machines that had issues when a voter selected one candidate, it highlighted the other one instead. With all the attention focused on the end of this presidential race and the upcoming vote, I figured today I will highlight some maps dealing with the location and potential security of voter registration machines.

VerifiedVotingFoundation.org

This organization is a nonpartisan organization that seeks to verify and validate elections. They offer a categorical thematic map that details the voting methods per state. As the map relies on categorical data it is brightly colored and easy to read with a clear and descriptive legend to accompany it. The map is clickable at the state level, which takes you to a county level view of the voting methods. This detail is really only useful for states that have implemented mixed voting methods such as Texas and Florida. Overall this is a nicely created map that provides all the basics. There is no additional supporting material to accompany this map. This would have been nice to see, maybe a link to additional information on voting machine technology. But overall the information presented is useful and easy to discern.


verifyervm.png



Voting Machines in the USA From DVice Website

First off, I have never heard of this website before and was a little unsure about using it as a map source in this review. Looking at the information about the website though indicates it is ran by the SciFi channel and actually is aimed at exploring technology and related gadgetry. The map they post is a little more detailed and aims to elaborate on the voting machines as well as focus on potential problems and vulnerabilities they might have. DVice indicates that they thoroughly examined and questioned the makers of the different voting machines and came up with two measured statistics: hackability and potential for error. Based on their research they then assigned the different methods to different categories on a 1-5 scale (Additional information can be found here[^]).


dvicevm.png

The site contains two maps: potential for error and potential for hacking. As mentioned above, the maps display data based on the determined categorical score as mentioned above. For the error prone map, they determined that paper ballots were more error prone while electric was less error prone. For the potential hackability, they determined that electrical was more hackable while paper was less hackable. The map reflects these colors based on the chosen voting methodology by the state. Hovering over a state, a dialog gives the breakdown of percentage of different voting technologies used in the state. Clicking on the state brings up an information window with county level data and the breakdown of technologies used. There is also a summary of past issues that the state has had with voting and additional information. As well, there a link to information about the voting machine used is included.

I really like the layout of this site and think that the developers of the site put some thought into how best to display this data. I really like the additional information provided and the fact that there are links to more information about the voting machines used. The map colors are easy to discern and provides some interesting food for thought.

The maps can be seen here[^] for the Verifier website and here[^] for the DVice website. As I have said in previous postings please feel free to leave me your thoughts or interpretations in the comments, and please check back as I will be adding additional content to this series soon.