Category: Maps

Ireland 2020 General Election HEX Maps

Ireland has a great single transferable election system. It means that every vote is meaningful even for smaller parties and candidates. It also means mapping the results is difficult. As each constituency has more than one seat, ranging from three to five.

One way to map the results is to have the constituencies split up. Either geographically, so split into parts based on how many seats it has. Or into equal sized pieces, like hexes.

Since I had not seen an election hex map for Ireland yet. I thought I would attempt to make one for the February 2020 General Election.


As HEX. One hex per seat.


Hex no labels.


Constituencies split into equal sized parts based on number of seats.

The hexes and split files can be found on GitHub:
https://github.com/HeikkiVesanto/Ireland2020GeneralElectionHEX

Geometries were split using the tutorial from Paul Ramsey:
http://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2018/06/polygon-splitting.html

Every Person in Great Britain Mapped

A follow up to my previous post: Every Person in Scotland on the Map. Winner of the 2016 OS OpenData Award for Excellence in the use of OpenData from the British Cartographic Society.

Full size interactive map.

The mapping process is pretty straightforward, and not accurate. I don’t know where you live. But I can make an educated guess.

I simply amalgamate the two sets of census data from the NRS (National Records of Scotland) for Scotland (2011 census) and the ONS (Office of National Statistics) for England and Wales (2010 census).

Postcodes were then created based on the ONS Postcode Directory, filtering for postcodes that were live in 2011 (which is the latest census data). The postcode centroids were turned into polygons using voronoi polygons.

Then we simply select all of the buildings in a postcode from Ordnance Survey, Open Map product, filtering out most schools and hospitals. Then we put a random point in a random building for each person in that postcode.

I would have loved to include Northern Ireland, but the Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland do not have an equivalent open building outline dataset, like Open Map from the Ordnance Survey.

Rendered with: QGIS tile writer python script. Processing done 100% in PostGIS.