Texas 2004 Presidential Election – (Click here for fullscreen visualization)

Texas 2006 Gubernatorial Election – (Click here for fullscreen visualization)

Texas 2008 Presidential Election – (Click here for fullscreen visualization)

Texas 2010 Gubernatorial Election – (Click here for fullscreen visualization)

In this post we will be examining Benford’s law when applied to Texas Counties, using data from the 2004 Presidential Election. All of the following visualizations are interactive, so feel free to play around with them. Let’s get started!

Looking above, we begin by looking at the counties we have data for and the relative number of votes cast in each county. There are over 100 counties which are not accounted for in this visualization. This number can be improved in future iterations, but is fine for our initial inquiries.

Next, we want to look at how Benford’s law applies to all of Texas. We use a combination of county and Voting Tabulation District (VTD) to create unique areas which are used as the most basic unit in both the overall Texas view, as well as the individual county views.

In the above visualization, the blue bars represent the percentage of the total votes cast in the 2004 Presidential Election where the number of votes in a County+VTD unit had the given leftmost integer. The gray boxes represents the range between the expected Benford’s Law percentage and 25% less, while the yellow boxes represent the range between the expected Benford’s Law percentage and 25% more.

Next, we want to look at how Benford’s law applies to individual counties in Texas. We use the same methods as before, except we break Texas up into smaller regions. The following visualization can also be filtered: you can search for counties and select which counties you would like to see.

Resources

This data set is available at http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/eda/data. Citation: Stephen Ansoloabehere; Maxwell Palmer, “Texas Data Files”, http://hdl.handle.net/1902.1/15890 UNF:5:8PVSe1XWAyhG5iGH09fUiw== V2 [Version]

This tutorial was a very helpful starting point for visualizing Benford’s Law in Tableau.