February 2009 The Faculty, Staff and Student Newspaper of the University of Richmond

University and Google partner on election analysis

The University’s Digital Scholarship Lab has partnered with Google to share historical voting data about U.S. presidential elections.

Google is opening up the data to millions of people around the world in a new format by layering historical election results over Google Earth.

The data comes from Voting America: United States Politics, 1840–2008, one of the projects of the Digital Scholarship Lab, which opened in 2007.

Anyone can access the Google Earth layer by going to Google’s 2008 Election site, www.google.com/2008election.

The collaboration makes digital maps of presidential elections from 1980 to 2004 available in Google Earth. The maps detail how people voted in every county in the United States, providing far more detail and information than is currently available in Electoral College maps. The voting returns also are paired with population data—including information on race, age, gender and income levels—in every county, allowing people to examine the factors that affected voting in any given election.

“We want to empower organizations like the University of Richmond to use the Google Earth platform as a way to share information and make a complex collection of data structures more easily accessible,” said Rick Klau, L’96, a manager on Google’s Elections team.

“Google is transforming the presentation of information around the world. It is exciting for the University of Richmond to ally with such an innovative and far-sighted enterprise,” said Edward Ayers, UR president. “We hope our joint effort will permit a broad range of people to understand American politics in a deeper and more subtle way.”
Andrew Torget, DSL director, said, “These maps allow you to dive deeply into how Americans have voted over the past several decades by looking at voting in each county in the country. When you examine the maps, you discover amazing patterns that Electoral College maps tend to miss. The complex patterns make you question whether the country is as deeply divided into red and blue regions as we often think. This collaboration with Google will allow us to share cutting-edge research with the world.”