Following a very interesting post I’d found on twitter by Paul Campbell, I was curious to try to recreate the plots involved myself.

Plotting a coloured point as a representation of 100 votes in each ward is interesting, it gives a surprising feel for the sense of party proportions in an area. It doesn’t give a sense of voter turnout vs population, but it does give a sense of scale to voting in areas.

I did wonder if the sense of geographic detail from each plot point, (the location within a ward is randomly generated), was misleading though. For example, 100 plots below.

You can see the variation between each frame, however I was surprised I didn’t notice more of a difference. Perhaps just due to the scale of the individual points to the electoral ward it retained the same sense of voting proportions, as well as (although to a lesser-extent) geographic spread across parties.

This was an interesting plot to try out. I’ve been enjoying ‘Guardian Visual’ and other election coverage recently, especially in the run-up to this year’s local elections, and it’s given me a lot to think about.