In elections, “Who really decides?”
A simple visualisation for a complicated question, from ABC News
Democracy may seem straightforward — every citizen has a voice — but if you scratch the surface of any democratic electoral system, you find discrepancies between the population as a whole and those whose voices “count”. From voter eligibility, to registration, to turnout to party politics: Who really decides? A team from ABC News (Australia) visualised this tricky question in a prototype created at the Walkleys Editors Lab in Sydney in March 2016. Their data visualisation was published just a couple months later and the format they developed was reused again and again by the newsroom to cover several other complex topics.
Team ABC, represented by Simon Elvery, Colin Gourlay and Ben Spraggon, built a nearly ready-to-publish prototype of “Who really decides?” by the end of the two-day hackathon. The user sees the entire population of Australia whittled down to just a small percentage of swing voters who hold the deciding voices. The visualisation explains why parties campaign so hard for a small number.
From prototype to publication, Simon Elvery explained that they needed to do code-refactoring to adapt the prototype to ABC’s publishing platform. They also did some fact-checking and minor content adjustments. “It was close enough to the finished product coming out of the hackathon that it could basically be worked to completion by one developer,” said Simon.
This was their first attempt at this type of “scrollytelling” data visualisation. “We used the electoral system as a test subject for exploring how to create easily digestible visual explainers that refine large numbers to reveal their dominant and influential core components,” they explained.
The ABC News team had a smart prototyping strategy at the Editors Lab as they were able to create a useful and long-lasting tool. They found success with the same format while reporting Australia’s 2016 census. Their piece “This is Australia as 100 people” generated a spike in interest. “It took what is essentially a long list of percentages — i.e. a very boring story — and turned it into something engaging and interesting for the audience,” said Simon.
The ABC visuals team put the technique to use again to map the recent debate on same-sex marriage in Australia as and to explain message encryption. Simon explained that at ABC, they’ve moved towards these more narrative formats over interaction, a trend we’re seeing across newsrooms.
Narrative structures like this allow journalists to frame and contextualise data sets into understandable stories, not to mention they’re mobile-friendly. While interactive exploratory data visualisations can be impressive, oftentimes complex or “boring” stories are better served by this more granular, user-friendly approach. “The best stories always have some element of both, but finding the exact mix which will best serve the story and the audience is a real art,” said Simon.
To read more of Simon Elvery’s thoughts on narrative versus exploratory data storytelling, see his blogpost here.
See ABC’s GitHub account to access some of their scrollytelling code .
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