23 of the best digital Nordic election features
Curated by Teemo Tebest (@teelmo) and Magnus Bjerg (@magnusbjerg).
Later today we are doing our presentation on the latest Nordic elections at the ONA18 conference in Austin, TX with Fredrik Laurin (@fredriklaurin). You can also download Teemos’s presentation and read an abridged version of mine.
Along with that we have curated a cheat sheet with the best, most innovative election features from Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland.
The examples linked below are (mostly) in Scandinavian languages so we recommend watching Borgen, Moomins or SKAM. Alternatively you can use Google Translate in the browser to get a better feel of the features.
TV 2 Denmark — Candidate Test
Answer some questions about politics and the test will match you with the candidates in your local municipality that best matches your opinions. Includes local questions.
http://nyheder.tv2.dk/kommunalvalg17/kandidattest
TV 2 Denmark — Election Results
Simple and mobile friendly results page that let you see the local results all the way down on polling station level. When live it had a countdown timer to show that the results were coming in live.
http://nyheder.tv2.dk/kommunalvalg17/resultater
TV 2 Denmark — Mayor Overview
Due to the complicated nature of the Danish election system i usually takes up to a week to know who will become the mayor in every municipality. This page gave an overview while the positions we filled over several days.
http://nyheder.tv2.dk/politik/2017-11-16-overblik-se-hvem-der-vandt-borgmesterposten-i-din-kommune
DR Denmark — Local Solutions
Crowdsourced overview of hundreds of local solutions to political problems where volunteers did work many might consider the responsibility of the local municipality.
https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/politik/kv17/lokale-loesninger
DR Denmark — The Candidates
A scrolling story of how Hillary Clinton and Trump ended up competing for the highest office in USA. Playful use of graphics and it is also in English.
https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/webfeature/kandidaterne
DR Denmark — Election Results
Detailed election results page that even shows polling areas. Worked best on desktop.
https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/politik/kv17/resultater
Verdens Gang Norway — Candidate Test
Simple candidate test for the recent Norwegian national election with a particular use of bubble heads to match readers with the candidates they agree with the most.
https://www.vg.no/spesial/2017/valgomat/#start
Verdens Gang Norway — Interactive Election System Explainer
VERY advanced interactive to show how different the Norwegian parliament would look if the election system was different. Very popular with schools.
https://www.vg.no/spesial/2017/stortingsvalg/
SVT Sweden — Election Simulator
Explains the difference between the Swedish and British election system with simple yet good looking animations.
https://www.svt.se/special/valsimulatorn-uk/
SVT Sweden — Candidate Test
The Swedes didn’t just have to cover one election, but three simultaneous elections in their candidate test this year:
SVT Sweden — The candidates that disagree the most with their party
By analyzing the candidate’s answers in their candidate test SVT was able to visualize which candidates disagree the most with their party.
https://www.svt.se/special/hur-lika-ar-kandidaterna-sina-partier/
SVT Sweden — Create your own government
By simple dragging and dropping the user can put together a government of her own choosing and see how many seats it will add up to. But the clever thing is that the politicals editor will comment on the home-made governments viability.
https://www.svt.se/special/pussla-ihop-sveriges-regering/
SVT Sweden — The Swedish Vote
Wonderful visualisation of how Sweden voted at the recent election. Data is truly beautiful sometimes.
https://www.svt.se/special/the-swedish-vote/
Yle Finland — Candidate Test for presidential elections
Candidate test for the presidential elections. We had eight candidates. What we did here was that we had 23 questions in which candidates had answered and they had also justified their answer. For each question we showed how candidates had answered and their justification and then allowed user to answer for him/herself. In the end user got the result, which candidates is the closest to him/her.
https://vaalikone.yle.fi/presidentinvaali2018?lang=fi-FI#1
Yle Finland — Presidental elections results
Election result service. One can get the result per municipality and even per election district.
https://vaalit.yle.fi/tulospalvelu/pv2018
Yle Finland — Voitto robot
In the previous local elections our robot journalist called Voitto wrote a story about the result for all of the 300 municipalities. So immediately when the result was ready in municipality Voitto published a story to our web site.
https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-9556353
Yle Finland — Election result in 7 maps
Map driven story about our municipality elections. 7 different point of view to the election result.
https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-9553510
Yle — Municipality radar
Huge from data to story effort to give voters insight on the status of their municipality. See
Version 1 https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-9192528
Version 2 https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-9490180
Yle — How your new council thinks
We asked the candidates to answer 30 questions related to the municipality elections. After the result we made a story which shows how the elected council things.
https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-9552923
Yle — Candidate Tinder
For our parliamentary elections we made a Tinder like game where you can pick up your candidate only based on age, looks and first name — just like in Tinder. The engagement was huge.
https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-7869067
Yle — Election stream
A service where you could see the video presentations of all your municipality’s candidates.
https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-9524277
Yle — Election gallery
In the parliamentary elections we interviewed all the candidates in a studio. In municipality elections candidates made the videos with mobile device.
http://vaalikone.yle.fi/eduskuntavaalit2015/vaaligalleria
https://vaalikone.yle.fi/kuntavaalit2017/vaaligalleria
Yle — “What if only the sickest would have voted”
We picked up 5 variables, and looked into the elections result if only the poorest, sicked, least educated, lowest income and oldest municipalities votes would have counted.
We will most likely have missed something. Feel free to tip us. The list will be updated later.
