Coding the US Election Tools
Timeline: Nov 2020 | Visit link
Description: I was part of the effort to track the 2020 US elections. The Guardian had a distributed team, and I worked with Alvin Chang in the US and Ashley Kirk, Sean Clarke, Helena Robertson, and others in the UK to implement a few things:
the pages of the Democratic primaries, including Super Tuesday
Tracking the mail-in ballots in 13 swing states with ProPublica
Democratic Primaries
I worked on web pages for the Democratic primary results pages for 2020 US Election. This required me working with Associated Press’s API and write regular scripts, along with Sean Clarke, to retrieve and parse the data. I also applied the visual styles of the Guardian, and included much of the UX process, as I thought of election trackers tools/products.
I also designed and implemented an idea of a ‘bulletin board’, a block element that designed modularly, and was meant to show readers the state of any ongoing election at a certain time.
We set up a separate S3 server where we stored the AP results after formatting it in a way more helpful to us, then we simply had these elements fetch from that server every minute or so. These elements were meant to be embedded in other pieces, so routing was an important consideration.
And, of course, these bulletin board blocks had to be well-designed, fit the Guardian brand, and appropriately sized for different contexts.
Mail-in Ballots
Timeline: Oct 2020 - Nov 2020 | Visit link
Description: I was part of the effort to track the 2020 elections. More specifically, I was put in charge of tracking the mail-in ballots in key swing states. I worked with fellow journalist Alvin Chang, and newsroom Propublica to collect and clean data, and style it into understandable graphs around election day.
