I couldn't think of a better idea, so I decided to think of ways to represent election results. It was hard to think of things that weren't already done this year, so some of my ideas are somewhat unorthodox. I decided to focus on a presidential election, because I'm not sure how other types of elections work. I haven't decided whether I want to limit it to 2 parties or not. Basically, I wanted to find a way to represent information that was mostly graphical, but would leave any room for different interpretation. Sometimes purely graphical info is ambiguous, which is why I will need to show numbers. As a counterexample, one of my ideas for showing popular vote results (while the election is happening) is showing a race between a donkey and an elephant, the two "mascots" of the democratic and republic parties, respectively. This would be funny, but not useful at all, because a distance between the racers could be any number, and it wouldn't be useful to the person who wants to see how far ahead one party is. It might be useful at a first glance, but not useful after that. One thing that I thought would be useful is an "interactive" map of the United States. Not sure how I would program this, but it seems like it would be the most useful graph I could make. It would show an overall result, with the map shaded in different states depending on which party won where, but one could also click on a state and it would bring up the state in greater detail. A user could also compare two or more states. The main design heuristics that would be used would be difference in color, and with graphs, size. However, I could use any number of different things to represent results from states. I'll have to think about it more.
-Ben Reback
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