Mapping our elections

05/19/07

Posted under May 2007 elections

MUCH as I love the Inquirer.net electoral map, we have a long way to go. In Pollster.com, which focuses on survey results, see their 2006 House Race and 2006 Senate Race survey maps.

For actual election results, see this unusually-designed map showing the gains and losses of the parties, for the US House of Representatives in the 2006 race.

A particularly interesting show-and-tell is by M.E.J. Newman, who looks at how to present election results for both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and in a way that shows the relative populations of various areas.

We have the potential for doing such maps: Filipino map-renderers on Wikipedia are, to my mind, particularly gifted. See the electoral map for the 2004 presidential election on Wikipedia, it’s great!

The problem with rendering Philippine political maps, to my mind, are mainly 3:

1. the number of provinces keeps increasing. Since 2004, our provinces have increased from 79 to 81.
2. the number of congressional districts keeps changing (and I wonder if the majority have been adequately mapped: just on Wikipedia, not every province has its congressional districts mapped the way Negros Oriental does, for example).
3. my understanding is the last time the country was properly mapped was in the 1950s.

And the generally-slipshod way data is maintained means media, for one, is often at odds with each other because a report involving numbers is only as good as the data government feeds the media groups.

A good example is the now-controversial province of Maguindanao. The Inquirer.net electoral map puts the number of registered voters there at 289,092. However, in a report, Sun-Star says the following:

From 275,572 registered voters in 2004, the number of voters in this year’s elections went up by more than 43 percent or to 396,772.

So what gives? I emailed Inquirer.net editor-in-chief JV Rufino about it, and this was his explanation:

Some of the towns in Maguindanao have moved to the new province of Shariff Kabunsuan which didn’t exist in 2004. As we compare town per town, we moved some towns to Shariff Kabunsuan to allow the comparison. If Shariff Kabunsuan had never been created, Maguindanao would have 455,601 registered voters based on the 2004 registered voters Excel file [PDI Research] gave us. You can get that figure by adding the “2004″ registered voters of the Shariff Kabunsuan marker and adding that to the 2004 figures of the Maguindanao marker.

A satisfactory explanation to my mind, but one which requires of readers more mental juggling than is perhaps reasonable to ask. But what can you do? Not much.

Right now, I’m trying to complete a simple list, going down the number of Lakas vs. Kampi races in the House, and let me tell you, it’s an ordeal. The first problem is getting results: the local tallies that Inquirer.net uploads, for example, don’t all have the same data and the information changes from list to list. You can try getting information (for example, matching the lists of winners to lists of candidates and their parties) from the Comelec website, but again, not every province has information and even provinces with information don’t all contain the same kind of information.

Anyway here’s my list:

It’s very rough, not least because there’s no central location on the ‘net where one can find the results of local races. After finishing it, the next step is comparing it to the list of the Institute of Popular Democracy, as to which districts where the opposition had a fighting chance, actually turned out well or badly for the opposition.

And as a picture’s worth a thousand words: imagine if all these things were on maps!

By mlq3
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