I have been know to get involved with local politics from time to time. About 5 weeks ago, when a federal election was called here in Canada, I decided to build an application that would help local campaign scrutineers get their results in quickly and easily. Election night results and turnout information is notoriously difficult to collect and keep.
An election campaign in Canada is an interesting thing. It is essentially a company that is created, runs for 5 weeks, and then disappears. A cloud solution seemed to be the perfect answer.
I’ll talk more about the application in a future post, but once the application was built, it attracted the interest of one of the major media organizations in Canada, PostMedia. The only thing that they wanted added was mapping.
Another few days of work with the Bing Maps Silverlight control, and we had a couple of fairly interesting apps ready for public consumption. They’re currently available on the PostMedia website here:
http://www.canada.com/news/decision-canada/past-results-ridings.html
and here:
http://www.canada.com/news/decision-canada/past-results.html
Basically, you can see the results for the last two federal elections on a national basis, or on a poll by poll basis for individual ridings.
In case PostMedia removes these links after the current election, you can see the same applications here:
http://electionresults.cloudapp.net/NationalViewer.aspx
http://electionresults.cloudapp.net/DistrictViewer.aspx
More later…
