Election madness 2024 — one year in the Data Vis Dispatch

Vivien Serve

Hi, this is Vivien. 99% of my time at Datawrapper I’m responsible for writing the Data Vis Dispatch, our weekly blog format about the best and brightest data visualizations of the week. This week I took a break from writing it to write about it.

Elections are a big issue this year for more than half of the world’s population that is eligible to vote. More than 4.1 billion people live in countries that will vote in 2024.

With this sentence, we started our first Data Vis Dispatch of 2024. “Election madness” and “not without election-related visualizations” became a running gag throughout the year. Inspired in part by my colleague Rose’s article about the Dispatch in 2022, I’m taking my Weekly Chart duty as an opportunity to look back and see if we were right in calling the Data Vis Dispatches of 2024 the “Dispatches of Elections.”

Out of the 1570 visualizations (🤯) that Lisa, Rose, and I included in the 48 regular Dispatches of 2024, 398 visualizations were primarily about elections.

The strictest election visualizations show polling numbers and results themselves. Then there are the other election-related topics, ranging from maps of polling stations in India to personal data about Scottish candidates. But honestly, anything from sports to finance can be related to politics, so even our "unrelated topics" category may still contain some visualizations with an election angle.

Never not talking about elections

But how often have we included election-related visualizations in the Dispatch? The answer: every single time. There were peaks, of course, especially during the European Union elections in June and the event that eclipsed all others this year in terms of visualizations produced: November's U.S. presidential election.

What did we miss?

On January 9 we featured a scrolling visualization from Le Monde that listed all 68 countries where people would vote in either presidential, legislative, or local elections in 2024. I was wondering how many of these elections we actually managed to show. For the sake of simplicity, I visualized this on the country level — so for example, since there were elections in Galicia, an autonomous region of Spain, Spain was marked as a whole country.

Bearing in mind that some of these elections can hardly be called elections, as they took place under authoritarian governments, it is still very noticeable that we saw a lot about European countries and the U.S., and missed a lot from Africa. Perfect time for a call for help: If you readers know of sources we haven't included, I'd be grateful for any tips!

Curious about the visualizations I've been talking about all the time? I'll leave you with a photo book to browse through:

That's it from me for now! If you have any interesting new sources that will help me feature more election visualizations from less represented countries this year, leave them in the comments below. Next week we'll hear from app developer Julian.

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Vivien Serve

(she/her) is a working student on Datawrapper’s Communications team. She creates the Data Vis Dispatch to keep data visualization enthusiasts up to date on exciting new projects. When she’s not working, she studies interface design, and when she’s not studying, she’s planning a festival stage or soldering light installations. Vivien lives in Potsdam.

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