The National Elections are only a week away. In news this weekend, there have been reports of massive numbers of voters turning out for early voting. In some places, voters are met with long lines. Next Tuesday it probably won’t be any different. In light of the reported record turnout at the polls, I want to focus today’s post on a map dedicated to informing the voter about states’ early voting practices.

This was a little bit more difficult to find than what I thought it would be. Eventually I did find a good site and depicting map that shows state by state early voting practices. I found this map in a series of maps and detailed information on voting trends and patterns at the website hosted by the PEW Center for the States. I will go over some of the other maps and data in future posts as I think they exemplify true GIS like principles in being able to ask questions and get answers about voting in voter habits, as well as other data on the site. For now, I will just focus on the Early and Absentee Voting Policies map.


earlyvoting.png

The map itself is fairly simple. It is a standard categorical map broken up by combinations of early and absentee voting policies and highlights which are available by state. The map is non interactive, except for a dropdown list for choosing the year to make historical comparisons. At the bottom of the page is a bar chart comparing states’ policies. I feel this is fairly useless in this context. As well there are several links to additional information about the methodology and detailed sites covering specific states. From that site I further clicked over to a chart that has a list of conditions for each states absentee and early voting policies as well as a blog detailing early voting trends. As I said, a fairly straight forward map that does what I was looking for, looking at state policies regarding early and absentee voting.

The website can be viewed here [^]. 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.