References

Conclusion
In the past ten or so years, computer technology , the internet and increased
availability of GIS software have made it possible for none specialists to gain access
to data and the software need to analysis it.
A good example of this is the results of the 2012 presidential election. A search of
the world wide web for the results the 2012 US presidential election will one will
find a proliferate of charts, papers and maps. Using GIS one is able to visualize the
election results geospatially. One type of map that seems to be rather popular is a
map showing the election results at the county level colored code Red for
Republicans and Blue for Democrats. A quick look at these maps one would see
most of the counties in Red with far fewer Blue counties on the east and west coasts
with a few scattered here and there. If one were to look at this map one could
quickly surmise that the republican candidate Mitt Romney won the election
handedly based solely on the amount of area that is covered red. But this is not the
case the democratic Candidate Barack Obama won the election. In spit of this the
simple red blue results map has been posted on conservative websites, blogs and
shared ad nauseam on social media to give the idea that most of the country is
conservative and in agreement with agenda of the Republican party. Is this a correct
assumption? In order to answer this question a number of attempts have been made
to use GIS to analysis the election results and create maps that give a more accurate
idea of the political leaning of the country. Allot of these maps, try to blend blue and
red colors based on the number of votes for each party to create a "purple" map of
election results. Others create cartograms of election results which distort the shapes
and areas of the counties based on there population or some other characteristics
the counties may have. Cartograms give a better picture of the election results but
can be hard to understand or get any meaningful information from.
In this project I have decided to attempt to created maps of the election results
that give a better idea of the political leanings of the country. I have created Three
maps. The first map I created is simply and map of the elections results at the
county level coded to Red or Blue depending on which party won. I have included
this map to show how misleading this kind of map can be. The Second map is a
map of the election at the county level showing the margin by which the party won
the county coded to shades of red or blue. Dark red or Blue indicates that the
candidates won my a huge margins will lighter color show a lesser degrees. And the
last map attempts to take into account the counties population density and that
influences the states electoral votes by calculating and visualizing the counties
electoral density
Introduction
Methods
Results
Trying to create an election map with ArchMap that upon visual inspection the
map reader could quickly determine who won has proven to be more difficult than
first expected. The margin of victory map does a better job of showing that country
is not as conservative or sharply divided as the Red/Blue political party map would
have you believe. I appears that in most of the counties in the country we are
evenly divided between political parties with the exception of a few hot spots.
Unfortunately the make up of congress doesn't especially the House of
representatives does reflect this equal division. The results of the electoral Density
map were not as clear cut as I would have hoped for. I believe that with a little
more research it may be clearer way to show which parts of the country dominate
presidential election. At the moment democrats appear to have a good hold on the
Higher density areas of the country. If the Republicans want to win in national
election in the Future they will need to figure out how to appeal to voters in the
more urban populated area of the country.

CHOROPLETH MAPS OF THE 2012 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Jeremy Jackson
Salt Lake Community College
County level election result data for each of the lower 48 states obtained online
from huffington post data, county population data, county and state boundary
shapes files obtained from the US census bureau website and ESRI's ArcMap
software were used to create three maps choropleth maps depicting the results of
the 2012 presidential election. Creating the first map was a rather straight forward
process of determining which party had the most votes in each county and color
coding accordingly. The second margin of victory map created my finding the
difference between the winning parties and losing party and then calculating a ratio
by normalizing the number by the number of votes for the losing party. The third
map was created using the following equations and then used graduated color to
code the electoral density for the winning candidate for each county using shades
of red or blue
Equation 1:
( )

2
=



Equation 2:
() =



Equation 3:
=
#

Equation 4:

2
=

Discussion
Looking at the maps created using ArcMap is still difficult to visually
determine which candidate won the election but using the margin of victory map
it is clear the that for most of counties won by the either candidate were one by a
slim margin. In the case of Mitt Romney the average county won was won by
margin of 1.4:1 and for Obama the average margin of victory for a county was a
slim .78 but he won the counties with the highest populations with large margins.
The electoral density map isn't quite as clear and this may not have been a very
effective method. But on close inspection it does show that Obama won a large
number of counties with a high electoral density than Romney which lead Obama
to win in states with a larger number of electoral votes. These Counties also
tended to be the states high population urban areas. It would probably been better
to symbolize the electoral density map in a way that better showed illustrated that
Obama won the higher density areas but comparing the lowest Obama Values to
the lowest Romney density values you can see that even here Obama's were
higher.

County election data: huffingpostdata, https://github.com/huffpostdata
Population and boundry data: US Census Bureau, http:/www.census.gov