Cedric Sam, an IT analyst with radio-canada.ca, has developed a custom electoral map using Google’s satellite imagery.

As you can see from the picture above, Sam used customized electoral maps and overlaid them on top of Google Earth’s satellite imagery. The technique was used once on-air for the federal election, and then several times for the recent Quebec provincial election.

To make it work Sam collected geographical and elections data from provincial and government sources and then feed it into a database. Then he incorporated the live elections results, and crunched it together to represent the ridings. “At each moment during the evening, by a click on the script, I could generate a fresh map with current data colored with the party in advance or elected in any given riding,” he said.

“The coolest map that we generated that night was that of parties finishing third in each riding. In a single shot, [we were] able to show how Quebec effectively returned to a two-party system with a map almost entirely colored in pale blue, the color representing Mario Dumont’s ADQ.”

Given that the next election is probably around the corner, this seems like a great application for the Canada Votes pages. To watch a Youtube video of the on-air presentation, click here.

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	Behind the Scenes, I.T., News & Journalism