Instructions

• The slider is used to dictate which Presidential Election is shown in the map and which one is highlighted in the bar graph and scatter plot. Any election not selected by the slider is dimmed out so only the relevant info is in focus.
• The bar graph is clickable, and when it is clicked, it transitions to percentage of votes rather than raw numbers. If it is clicked again, it will revert back to raw numbers, and cycles back and forth. Essentially, it is a loop.
• The choropleth graph is also clickable, and when it is clicked, it transitions to circles that represent the amount of popular votes each candidate got in the states. I implemented this since some people, when seeing graphs of election votes, tend to believe that land size accounts for votes, and that certain parties should be winning by a lot based on how much of their color is present on the map. I wanted to avoid this misconception so I added the circles to allow for a better understanding of how many votes each candidate really received.
• Each piece of data (bars, circles, states) all have tooltips that reveal the specific information/data for that element. Simply hover over any element and the tooltip will appear.

Questions

1. I am trying to analyze the effectiveness of the Electoral College System we have in place for Presidential Elections. Specifically, I am looking to see if the Electoral College System is truly indicative of the citizens' votes/opinions.
2. To show the data and answer my question, I collected Presidential Election data from MIT Election Labs, but that only had Popular Vote data from every state since 1976. I went to InfoPlease to find the Electoral Vote data for Presidential Elections so I could graph the Electoral Vote data. I also filtered out any independent presidential candidates since no independent presidential candidate won Electoral votes and there has only been Democratic and Republican nominees that have won elections.
3. I displayed my data in three different kinds of views: a clustered and stacked bar graph, a geographic map of the U.S., and a scatter plot.
   I used the bar graph to visualize the number of Popular and Electoral votes and the percentage of the total votes (popular and electoral) each candidate got. This was to highlight the disparity between the percentages of Popular Votes and Electoral Votes each candidate received to show that there is a disconnect between these votes, even though the Electoral Vote was designed to mirror the Popular Vote.
   I used the geographic map to showcase how each state voted for every election. I also showed how much of a lead each candidate had in each state to show that each state didn't always clearly vote for one candidate every year. There are states that lean towards a certain political side every election, but not every state. This is also to remove the curtain from the misconception that land area means votes.
   I used the scatter plot for a mathematical analysis approach to the question. In the scatter plot, I was looking for the correlation between Electoral Votes and Popular Votes. If Electoral Votes are a good representation of the Popular Vote, then there should be a positive correlation between Electoral Votes and Popular Votes. However, it is shown that there is no correlation between Electoral Votes and Popular Votes, meaning that the Electoral College is not an accurate representation of the Popular Vote.