Open Data Visualization Of The Afghanistan Election

Problems are usually easier to solve when you can see them visually. Understanding of the data is even more important if you're figuring out how trends correlate to triggers and underlying variables. Perhaps this is why it's so difficult for us to enact solutions, on a personal and group level, to thwart plaguing issues such as world hunger, deforestation, poverty, and pollution amongst others.

After stumbling across the topic of data visualization, I'm convinced that open data initiatives and open source web technologies will play a critical role to track and solve local and international issues.

For instance, take a look at the following open source data browser designed to track and visualize Afghanistan's election data. It's built by Development Seed, a progressive Drupal, open source, web development firm that specializes in building collaboration and communication tools for international development organizations such as USAID, United Nations, World Bank, and the Human Rights Watch.

Their most recent site, AfghanistanElectionData.org, funded by the National Democratic Institute utilizes mapping, geo data, and data aggregators to show voting breakdown by voting stations, district, number of votes compared to population sizes, and voter participation in different areas. It's absolutely amazing that the data was retrieved from PDF files. It may not have been otherwise possible for the data to be compared, analyzed, or reused in this way to prepare for future elections.

The National Democratic Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization working to support and strengthen democratic institutions worldwide through citizen participation, openness and accountability. According to their blog post, the site has 2 primary goals to:

1. Make data more accessible and transparent:

NDI said the aim of the site is to make the election data more accessible and transparent so that those involved in the Afghan political process, including government officials, political parties and domestic monitoring groups, as well as those in the international community can use the information to improve future elections.

2. Prevent fraud and increase voting accessibility future elections:

Making the raw polling data public and usable for varied analysis allows Afghan and international actors to consider scenarios that could help deter fraud in the future. In addition, given the availability of topographical data, the tool is able to show how voter accessibility around the country would be affected by weather and the timing of an election in the Afghan winter.

Development Seed's blog post also explains why this data matters. Check out the following data visualization and in the following excerpt:

In a country like Afghanistan that is underdeveloped with many settlements in very remote and isolated areas, logistics matter. Donkeys were even brought in to transport ballot boxes in the election. In addition to a light grey map of the country, which was used to provide a clean pallet to then overlay data on, we made two additional base layers - a hillshade map using SRTM, AIMS, and OpenStreetMap data, and a winter map showing the winter snow line at 1,800 meters.

Here you see the central part of the country - high in the Hindu Kush - covered in snow, which would have made participation in a late season election runoff impossible.

The Open Government Directive's push for open data formats is sure to be complimentary to data.gov, the Sunlight Foundation, and to building more online data visualization tools.