Via Brad Feld’s blog, here are a bunch of wonderful cartograms of the voting patterns of the US election.
I was first exposed to this interesting visualisation tool through Stewart Fotheringham’s group in the National Centre for Geocomputation (NCG), where they have used it extensively on Irish census results.
I recently wrote a post about the last General Election. Well, the time is upon us for the Seanad elections. As a TCD grad, I am entitled to vote for the three Dublin University Seanad seats. There are 11 candidates for the three seats, so competition is likely to be hot. Here’s a brief list of the hopefuls, again, with the best web presence I could find for them.
Indymedia website has a brief run down of the candidates in this constituency, and their “genetic origins”.
My analysis:
I mentioned earlier that only one of the candidates (Eric Byrne of Labour) standing in the Dublin South Central constituency in the recent General Election was an active blogger.
Well, it turns out that Byrne just missed out on the fifth seat by a whisker. The incumbent Aengus Ó Snodaigh pipped him by a mere 69 votes on the 10th count. Byrne’s blog hasn’t been updated since Thursday, the day of the election. Hopefully he’ll add another entry with his thoughts on the count. While I wouldn’t be a supporter of his politics, it’s certainly refreshing to see a politician blogging, and actively giving us (the electorate) an insight into what drives him. Let’s hope that more elected TDs take up his example.
A few other observations about this constituency. A couple of the independents managed to do OK, but never really challenged for a seat. Joan Collins (an anti-bin tax candidate) stuck it out the longest – until the 7th count – when she was eliminated with 3362 votes. The collapse of the PD vote nationally was in plenty of evidence here. For some unknown reason, the PDs ran two candidates in Dublin South Central, who, between them, only managed a paltry 923 votes.
In my recent post on the Dublin South Central election, I provided a URL for Tony McDermott’s website. A comment I received pointed out that the correct URL is http://www.tonymcdermott.ie/.
That makes a lot more sense. However, when one does a Google search for Tony McDermott this site doesn’t show up in the first five pages of results (I stopped looking after that). So even if it is the correct site, how many people are going to find it? Perhaps it’s because it’s a new site, and the search engines haven’t indexed it properly, I’m not sure…
The general election in Ireland has been called for May 24 – a little less than three weeks from now.
I live in the Dublin South Central constituency – a five seater. Four of the sitting TDs (MPs) are running again, with only Gay Mitchell bowing out.
Here’s the full list of candidates, linked with the most personal web presence that I could find for each of them (via Google).
Here’s a brief analysis:
http://moptxaal.websteps.ie/fulcrum.html?ep=5, and McGuinness’s URL (http://www.workersparty.ie/) looks like it belongs to the Workers’ Party, not just his candidacy. McNamara is a well known musical figure in Ireland, and his website reflects that. He does have a page on the site dedicated to his candidacy in the election