This election cycle has brought about a number of websites providing some rather cool interactive electoral maps to engage people and keep them coming back to their respective sites. As a fan of politics (and obviously the web) myself, below are some sites I have come across with the positives and negatives associated with them:

270towin (my presidential predictions were based off of this previously):

  • Positives: Easy to quickly change states from red to blue to toss-up, can split Maine and Nebraska electoral votes, shows the number of winning combinations, probabilities of who can win, a long history of past elections, and a 2008 electoral simulator
  • Negatives: The map looks too childish and only does presidential level
  • Things to improve: The simulator should not be done randomly, but rather by how the polls close (eg: East Coast to West Coast). If they really wanted to impress people, they could do fake videos for each state acting like the media does by calling it throughout the night depending on how you choose the states (or based on polling data) as this would certainly keep people coming back.

RealClearPolitics:

  • Positives: Solid map (looks professional), shows the electoral spread over time, provides an easy to see polling changes, and does Congressional level
  • Negatives: No Maine and Nebraska split ability and does not explain how they calculate their results leading to charges of them being biased towards the Republicans (and even though the map still shows a very strong possibility of Obama winning, their testimonials pretty much come from right-wing sites or people)
  • Things to improve: Multiple kinds of maps to show electoral power of states rather than just their regular size to understand the importance of how many votes a state actually has.

Economist:

  • Positives: Innovative to have the world vote through the similarity of the US electoral college for the world, gives backgrounds on each candidate with latest news, and can quickly go from country to country to see information on them
  • Negatives: The number of electoral votes for the US is incorrect (they have it at 432 instead of 538), no explanation on the number of online votes needed to show votes for either candidate, and cannot click on French Guinea as you can with Greenland
  • Things to improve: Same idea of showing electoral power of states, could make it more interactive by running it as a future world-wide vote for leader of the whole world rather than for the US president.

Update (5:25PM):

FiveThirtyEight is another one that’s good for seeing polling predictions based on some statistical analyses, but not necessarily for people to interact with.