Wisconsin's state supreme court vote visualized

Published 2011-04-06

UPDATED JUNE 28: It took me a while, but I finished off an updated version of this map, which you can find here on madison.com.

UPDATED 8:09 P.M. THURSDAY: Things took another turn on Thursday as Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus said due to an inputting error she had undercounted -- by 14,000 votes.

Via The Wisconsin State Journal:

The new totals showed Prosser with 92,263 votes in Waukesha County, while Kloppenburg had 32,758. Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus said the votes weren’t reported to The Associated Press on Tuesday due to “human error.”

Thinking I will now hold off on updating the numbers on the Wisconsin Supreme Court election map until canvassing is completed. Scroll down and you will find it. The colors are still solid, but obviously the numbers in each county are now off.

You can find some aggregated links on the votes in Waukesha County here.

UPDATED 4:17 P.M. THURSDAY: On Thursday afternoon, the Winnebago County clerk updated election numbers that now give incumbent Justice David Prosser 710 more votes and assistant attorney general JoAnne Kloppenburg 466 votes.

Via The Wisconsin State Journal:

If the numbers stand, Prosser would be ahead of Kloppenburg by 40 votes.

Working on updating the map below to show the change.

When the final precinct finally reported Wednesday -- that's you Lake Mills -- attorney JoAnne Kloppenburg declared victory over incumbent state Supreme Court Justice David Prosser.

But when a candidate declares victory with 50.01 percent of the vote, a recount is obviously on the horizon.

Denying that the Supreme Court race turned into a referendum on his push to end collective bargaining rights for state union workers, Gov. Scott Walker said Wednesday afternoon that Tuesday's results were "largely driven by Madison" and that there are two worlds in the state.

The map below shows there are two worlds, but perhaps a bit more equal than any partisan will admit.

Obviously Dane, Waukesha and Milwaukee counties are the state's population centers, so they carry a bigger weight when all the votes are counted.

But just as the vote count stands at 50.01 percent for Kloppenburg and 49.99 for Prosser, so too does the state it seems judging by the county-by-county breakdown for each candidate.

Much thanks goes out to Jon Davenport and John Keefe for their suggestions and tutorials, and to news app teams at the Chicago Tribune and the Bay Area Citizen for their inspiration.

John K's blog post put forward a great method for working with the shapefiles and merging them census data in Google's Fusion tables. John's patience and help as I fired off questions on Twitter can't be understated.

And special thanks to Christopher Groskopf for his how-to blog post on the RedEye's homicide map, and for making the data available. The quick walk-through helped me get a quick win and make sure I wasn't crazy.

There is plenty more I could do with this. The fact that eastern counties drift off into Lake Michigan bothers me, and I may still try to overlay a map showing how the state voted in November, when Walker defeated Democrat Tom Barrett. Adding a default zoom-level and some other bells and whistles would be neat. Campaign finance data for each candidate broken down by the county would be way cooler.

But for now, I'm gonna call it a completed project and move on to the next thing. Seems I have too many "works-in-progress" and not enough I call complete.