Karnataka Election Rediff Sentimeter

The Karnataka Election Sentimeter has been built by Rediff to enable our users to understand the details of the Karanataka Elections. This is the second Election Sentimeter with the earlier one built for Gujarat Elections.

Data journalism is the new trend in journalism where increasing amounts of data is being assembled, processed and provided to the end users along with the tools to empower them to understand the underlying information.

In this project we have used clean, authentic election data and are presenting it to our users in an interactive way for them to understand the election outcomes under different circumstances.

What we did behind the scenes

• Assembled authentic historic election data.
• The data includes election wins, margins, contestants from Assembly elections of 2004, 2008 and municipal elections of 2013.
• On assembling and processing the data, parts that were relevant were selected and used further.

Methodology Used

• A mathematical model was built using winning trends and winning margins from above data to come up with a historic trend based forecast at the overall and per constituency level for Karnataka Elections 2013.
• The outcome per constituency from the Sentimeter based on the historic data could be a win for either BJP or INC or JD(S), the three main parties in the 2008 assembly elections. There are variations of BJP Tilt, INC Tilt and JD(S) Tilt for these parties. The outcome is marked as Swing (could go to any party) if the historic data is too close to call.

What is presented to our users?

• The Sentimeter is presented in an interactive graphical map interface using Rediff maps to enable our users to pictorially consume the historic trend based seat count.
• The Sentimeter is optimized to work on desktop, ipad and mobile browsers of iphone and Android (version 2.2 and higher).
• The current political mood in Karnataka could be different from the past elections. This is the reason the Sentimeter is offered as a tool to the users, so that the users can move the slider towards INC or BJP to see the potential outcomes.
• A slider is provided to enable our users to add a BJP or Congress bias to the election election count. By sliding to the left and adding an INC bias to the data model, a recalculated seat count is presented to the user by internally altering the winning margins in INC’s favor. This may or may not alter the final outcome of the constituencies based on its historic performance. By moving to the right a BJP bias is added.
• At the per constituency level the details presented to the users are:
• The 2012 contesting candidates from the major parties
• 2008 results

Link to Gujarat Elections Methodology

Gujarat Elections Sentimeter Methodology has details of the sentimeter for Gujarat Elections.