We’re just workin out the details of an interactive map of Illinois by district rolling out on Daily Kos this week. If you have a sec take a peek below — be sure and read the text below the image before you play with it.
This is a sweet little widget my friend DavidNYC at Daily Kos will be featuring this Tuesday for the GOP primary — I may not be able to keep it up for long because it’s stored on the Daily Kos server and being delivered here courtesy of that site’s bandwidth, potentially causing issues for FTB and DK (I got the OK from my DK colleague to post it here for a test). If it’s displaying correctly on your screen, you should be able to zoom in and out, move the center around, and see Illinois districts by color code. And if you click on a district, it should create a pop-up over the map that’s currently blank, but can be populated with links and streaming election data when info and numbers actually start coming in on Tuesday evening. We’re interested in knowing if you can get those functions on your end, if any pop up blockers on your PC kick in, any weird display issues, if it locks you up, that kind of thing.
It doesn’t zoom far enough in for me to see my brother’s house (he lives in a suburb of Chicago).
It would be fun if we could zoom in on one neighborhood and see, home by home, who they voted for …. :)
That’s some absurd gerrymandering!
The pop-ups are rather slow, but they work; everything else is perfect.
It works well. I could locate the area near Dickenson park on the Northwest side where I grew up.
Okay, I have a really dumb question:
Why do some of the districts extend into Lake Michigan? Are there islands there that are inhabited or some kind Mer-people colony?
d cwilson:
Districts are generally described as being “X county, Y county, and portion n of Z county”, so if a district includes, say, Lake County, it will either formally include the part of Lake Michigan in Lake County, or it’s just the way Google Maps is analyzing the requests made of it.