Kansas Caucus Results 2012 interactive maps

It’s always exciting to watch real time results for any type of polling and interactive map are becoming more prevalent with each election. Several news sites have real-time interactive maps of the Kansas Caucus Results.

The Huffington Post has posted a real-time map of the Kansas Caucus Results. It’s at almost 30% reporting and hasn’t crashed yet. For any news map it is important to identify where the information is coming from and who designed the map. In this case the only map metadata I could find was this disclaimer, “Delegate allocations are tentative and might be adjusted later. Credits: Jay Boice, Aaron Bycoffe, Daniel Lee and Christian Rocha” .  The comments section of the real-time article only has one criticism that not all of the  candidates were broken out separately on the interactive map.

KMBC-TV  has an interactive map of the Kansas Primary which appears to have been created using Microsoft MapPoint by Hearst Publications and the AP.  Their interactive map includes all of the candidates.  The Economist has an extensive interactive map of the Republican Nominations  which provides results from the primaries/caucuses in each state and other information. There are probably more than ten different news sites with ten different ways of creating an interactive map to involve their audience in the excitement of the political process. It will be interesting to look into how many people leave an interactive map up on their computer screens to keep tabs on the polling.