[OSGeo Africa] Election maps

[Adi Eyal]

Hi All

I've been fiddling around the election data from the last municipal
elections and I've put together a graphic showing which wards were
contested and which are strongholds. I defined contested as there being a
less than 10% difference in vote counts between the first and second place
winners.

I'm by no means a cartographer and this is one of my first projects so I
was hoping for comments about how one might improve the maps. I guess the
one problem is that even though you know that a ward is contested, you
don't know by how much. Also (and i'm not sure this is important) you don't
know from the map what the individual wards are - only the municipality
they are in. Finally, I don't know where most of these municipalities are
situated so perhaps so sort of contextual map showing them in relation to
the rest of the country might be useful. Of course all of these things are
possible but might not be easy to achieve while still maintaining an
uncluttered design.

Any advice would be appreciated. The small version of the image can be
found here: http://za.okfn.org/2013/03/23/battle-for-local-municipalities/.
The complete poster is also available as pdf linked to on the site.

Hopefully this sort of question is not frowned upon in this forum (if it
helps, everything here was produced with open source tools :)).

Thanks
Adi

-- 
Adi Eyal
Data Specialist
phone: +27 78 014 2469
skype: adieyalcas
linkedin: http://za.linkedin.com/pub/dir/Adi/Eyal
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