Early voting isn’t coming in as hot as in 2020, but there are still a lot. For the Washington Post, Alyssa Fowers and Hannah Recht are using estimates from Associated Press to keep a running tally nationally and by state. There are 46.4 million early votes as of October 28.

From Dave Taylor, this world map shows tidal ranges, from microtidal to macrotidal:

Created using FES2014 data from Aviso+, this map displays maximum tidal ranges (the difference between the lowest low tide and highest high tide) around the world. As tides are primarily an ocean phenomenon, the data is presented in an ocean-centric Spilhaus projection.

It’s soothing, almost like staring out at the ocean. In case you’re unfamiliar with the Spilhaus projection like I was, here’s more information. It emphasizes the connectedness of the large bodies of water surrounded by land instead of the other way around.

Using a combination of Federal Election Commission filings and voter registration, the Washington Post shows which presidential campaign has received more money from donors from each ZIP code. It’s only online donations, so it’s just a subset of where the money is coming from, but I imagine offline donations are tightly correlated.

This week we imagine what we would do if the tool we relied on the most were to disappear.

For NYT Opinion, Patrick Ruffini, with graphics by Quoctrung Bui and Aileen Clarke, argues that the election outcome is less about swing states and more about pockets within each state:

The best way to tell how a state will vote is to build from the precinct level up, to dig into neighborhood data and to look at the differences in demographics and voting patterns across those precincts. Using this approach, I assembled more than 100 political microcommunities in the battleground states.

Speaking of grid maps and abortion access, Jan Diehm and Michelle Pera-McGhee, for The Pudding, estimated a complexity score (with variables from the Guttmacher Institute) for each state and made mazes to match the scores. Mazes are organized as a state grid map initially, but you can also sort by complexity, alphabetically, or by region.

Try to solve each maze to experience the complexity.

For the Washington Post, N. Kirkpatrick and Szu Yu Chen describe the legality of abortion pills in each state. There’s a grid map with a dropdown to select each state. I like the short summary sentence that updates with each selection. It makes the legality in your selected state obvious.

From Russell Samora for The Pudding, “Crokinole is like a mashup of shuffleboard and curling, played on a tabletop board.” There is even a playable simulation that you can practice on. I need to get myself a Crokinole board.

Some states have almost completely moved to voting by mail or early voting, whereas other states mostly vote in person on election day. For the Washington Post, Nick Mourtoupalas used a grid map to show how voting method changed each election since 2016.

Here in California, I voted by mail the last election, but I had no idea the percentages were that high. I’m also surprised by the high rates of early voting.

The estimates are based on data from the Election Administration and Voting Survey, which has run every two years since 2004.

Picking colors for visualization can be tricky, because there are infinite possibilities across the color spectrums. Often you’ll want to adjust hue, saturation, and lightness separately or together. Then you need to know what it actually looks like with your charts. Color Buddy might be the tool you need.

The goal of Color Buddy is to help you make excellent color palettes for data visualization via a direct manipulation environment that evaluates your color palettes as you go.

You might think that there are enough color-picking tools for visualization, but you’re wrong. There’s never enough and there never will be.

Damage assessments from UNOSAT estimate that 66% of structures in Gaza are damaged as of September 6, 2024, of which 78% are moderately to severely damaged or destroyed. This is about 128,000 buildings. For scale, Reuters compared the count to all the buildings in Manhattan.

This week, I heard that stats are for losers. I had to check it out, because I’ve always thought stats were for winners.

In an effort to measure and highlight risks globally, the German Federal Foreign Office released the Climate-Conflict-Vulnerability Index. It shows the risks of climate change, such as drought, floods, and wildfire. It shows conflict, such as armed violence and societal tensions. It shows vulnerability, such as gender inequality, food insecurity, and soil degradation.

An interactive map lets you see all the parts together or separately. It’s a lot of variables to take in at once, but the tool helps you sift to get a feel for risks everywhere. You can also download data quarterly or the full historical time series to analyze and visualize yourself.

For NYT’s the Upshot, Ronda Kaysen and Alicia Parlapiano highlight analysis by Patrick Sharkey, which shows time spent at home relative to 2003. Based on data from the American Time Use Survey, the trend was increasing, but the pandemic helped push things along.

See also the change by activity group that I looked at a while back.

We mostly hear about a handful of swing states these days, as presidential campaigns focused more on optimizing resources. Research by Shaw et al. identifies the shifts and the state-by-state results. For the Washington Post, Hannah Dormido and Adrián Blanco show the changes as a set of maps over time.

In the 1950s, you see wide coverage between the Democratic and Republican parties. In the 2000s, the strategies grow more sparse. I suspect the internet and an increasing volume of data had something to do with that.

You’re probably going to see election forecasts more this month, and one candidate will have a higher chance of winning than the other. Even so, it won’t mean much, because the forecast is basically a coin flip. Nate Silver explains the chances in the context of gambling:

Gamblers understand this, perhaps like nobody else. Yes, if you think Harris is really a 55/45 favorite and prediction markets have it the other way, you have a profitable wager — but you’re still going to lose the bet almost half the time. (There have been much bigger discrepancies between models and prediction markets in the past.) In sports betting, the breakeven point on a point spread bet is generally 52.5 percent — that’s just enough to cover the vig — but most experienced bettors would avoid the 53/47 games1 to reduce variance and because there’s ultimately no way to know that your model is right. In poker, you can’t avoid making tough decisions — you always have to fold, raise/bet, or check/call — but many decisions in the game are so close that you’re literally supposed to randomize your play, employing a mixed strategy because being unpredictable outweighs any slight edge from one line being superior to another.