Texas is an immense state full of varying ideologies and people. With this vast amount of space, it is paramount to know where you can vote. It is also good to know where your area stands politically, especially if you are deciding to move to an area where it would not suit your standards. We are making a database for Texans to reference for information on voting statistics in Texas. This database will include a map with voting locations and general stats about Texas voters.
(Note: Due to unavailability of data and time limitation with the project the team will focus on overall results of 2020 elections for Texas and study trends of voting behaviour in specific counties. We will drop the plan to map voting locations as the polling booth data is not available for all counties. In additon to that we did not find information for mapping all Texas counties so we decided to focus on 2 major counties with urban areas and manually plot a pecinct map for a smaller county with rural population.)
Target Audience: Texan or potential Texan residences, educational institutions, lawmakers, federal agencies
Team Members: Sunny Bhatt, Kristal Conception, Zane Rios, Chloe Valverde
At the outset, we had to find many trusted sources since political data tends to be faked. While they were not hard to find, it was tricky to gather the data in a concise way since there was an overabundance of data that we did not actually need. Some methods to extract our data included webscraping using BeautiFulSoup from Texas county offical websites, and finding csv plus geojson files from trusted sources with relevant data. Interestingly, one of the datasets was obtained by one of our team members contacting the secretary of state and they agreed to share some of the voting datasets with us in pdf and csv format.
Transform
After the datasets were acquired, we quickly went to cleaning and sorting them through a number of methods. These methods included using jupyter notebook to drop unnecessary data from csv files. We also had to convert these csv files into json format by using a web converter. We also employed the use of programs such as pgadmin and leaflet for proper graphing and plotting. Once this was done, we went to another source called Carto to map out the points onto a map of Texas. This website was able to accurately render the voting data into a graph for later use.
Load
On the other side of this, a dashboard was being made to visualize and display the cleaned data. This was done by loading the organized data into a dashboard and making it live via Github. We did this so it would be accessable for our target audience. The dashboad displays the 2020 election results for Texas and a breakdown of three different counties. We choose a couple counties with large populations and one with a small population to compare.
We created a custom map using maptile and geojson data available publically to ouline maps for Bexar county, Travis county and Austin county by Precinct. We also Added fullscreen function using leaflet pugin. We used a program called QGIS to map the geojson files and visualize them in a database format. This program also allowed us to join the geojosn files with the json files and add on missing information. For example the geojosn files only had the names of the counties with the multipolygon information. The json file had the names of the counties with the voting information. QGIS allowed us to join the two datasets on the common column (this example being the county names). After this, we used plotly to represtent bar charts and pie charts and used a chloropath leaflet method to show colors. Numbers were used as a varible to set color. And finally creating an html grid to hold all data in its own classes.
Results
Finally at the end of this project we were able to gather that even though the political map shows Texas as a very red state, there are nearly an equal amount of Democratic and Republican voters. In addition to this, the urban sections of Texas tend to vote democratic and the rural sections tend to vote Republican. At the end of this project we were able to deduce that Texas is a nearly purple state. In addition to this we discovered that, out of 29,145,505 million Texans, only 11,149,473 showed up to vote!
Personal insights/learned: Throughout this project we have learned an ample amount of data relating to Texas voting statistics. For one, while the data is stored in mass excel forms, it is not very clean for the average reader to understand. It must be redone in order to show a clear and concise retelling of the data.