Looking at a map of Pakistan, you might think that the largest province, Balochistan, would have a lot of the country’s voting power.
But once you take into account the 2017 census and redistribution of constituencies in other provinces, you realise that land mass doesn’t give you a good picture of the number of seats held by each province.
When creating data visualisations you need clarity.
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In the case of Pakistan, more than half the country’s population lives in Punjab, of which Lahore is the provincial capital.
On a traditional scale map, Punjab makes up less than a quarter of the total size of Pakistan.
Similarly, the country’s capital Islamabad would be almost invisible in pixel size when presented on a map.
That’s where cartograms come into play. Each hexagon represents a seat in the national assembly of Pakistan.
There are 272 contestable seats up for grabs in this year’s elections.
In this case, Balochistan ends up being a fraction of its size because it only has 16 seats assigned to it by Pakistan’s electoral system. Representing each seat as an equally sized hexagon means readers can find and interact with the district they’re interested in.
This is what a cartogram of the 2018 Pakistan elections looks like:
To compare the shifting redistribution of constituencies since the last two elections we also created cartograms for the 2008 and 2013 elections respectively.
Since the 2013 elections, Punjab’s seats were reduced from 148 to 141, redistributing seven seats to other provinces.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s seats were increased from 35 to 39, Balochistan from 14 to 16 and Islamabad gained one seat, while FATA and Sindh remained at their previous numbers of 12 and 61 respectively.
Karachi and Lahore are the largest cities in terms of population and number of national assembly representatives.
Karachi has also had a reduction in the number of seats by removing NA 236 — Malir I, NA 237-Malir II, and NA 238 Malir III from the Karachi electoral count and redistributing them to rural areas within the province. Without including Malir, Karachi has NA 239 to NA256, which is 18 seats from the 21 it was in 2013 and 2008 elections.
Lahore, the political heartland, gained one seat due to an internal redistribution within Punjab, going from 13 to 14.
The challenges
The main challenge of this project was sourcing the data. Pakistan’s election body trickled information out over the course of the past month. In most cases, these were static images for which we had to manually create each of the shapefiles that would be connected to our live election feed. One of the other challenges when creating a live results dashboard was to ensure that the page was lightweight and mobile friendly to cater to our audience both inside and outside Pakistan.
In terms of the technical process, the easiest way to produce a lightweight interactive experience was to export our maps as layered SVGs by adding each hexagon (NA-1 — NA-272) as a separate layer using Adobe Illustrator. We then bundled these layers into their respective regions.
The process, while quite slow, ensured that we could customise the geographic placement of each contestable seat. We then used Illustrator’s nifty export feature to generate a minified and responsive SVG that was under 60KB (smaller than most image thumbnails).
The next step was to feed live election data to the page. After exploring several options, we decided to create a custom dashboard using Google Sheets to make data entry flexible for multiple contributors on the move.
The output is a client-side Bootstrap page with very little server-side management to worry about.
For the final product visit: https://aljazeera.com/pakistan2018
