Background Information:

With the events of September 11, 2001 many issues previously deemed important have been pushed aside as seemingly unimportant.  The 2000 Presidential Election due a large degree has suffered this fate.  One year ago the outcome of the election was still undecided, in spite of two early declarations of victory by the news media.  In the end it took a United States Supreme Court decision stopping hand recounting of ballots in several disputed Florida counties to decide it.  In the aftermath many questions have been raised about the validity of the result and the election process.  In the news media, concern at the time centered around the recounts, the electoral college (how the winner of the popular vote, Al Gore, lost in the electoral college), and how balloting was conducted.  Legitimate questions have been raised about whether voters have been disenfranchised by the voting process.  Who can forget how dimpled and hanging chads entered our lexicon.

Project Design:
 

Using a political event as grounds for a GIS project is less common perhaps than locational analysis and is a little less straightforward.  Conceptually, in my mind, it does not include much in the way of multi-criteria evalution (MCE), which was used in our labs.  Instead I view GIS as a powerful tool for recognizing visually patterns or correlations spatially that would be less obvious or meaningful in tabular form.  As such, I see this project as a way of visualizing the related data in a way that makes it easier to make conclusions.

Central to the purpose of this project was conducting searches for both the raw data and for background information, which would lead to the intelligent formation of questions.  For instance the news media as mentioned above focused on several aspects of the election story.

• The closeness of the election.  The election was decided in the State of Florida and only 500 votes approximately separated the winner and loser.
• Al Gore won the popular vote, but lost the electoral college.
• The number of rejected ballots and method of voting

These provide good grounds for questions in GIS.  The Presidential Election is determined by who wins the Electoral College.  Each state has a number of Electoral College votes and the candidate (party) that wins the popular vote in each State, receives that State's Electoral College votes.  County level results are available and they provide a more micro-level look at voting patterns, but it is only the state level popular vote that determines the result.

Due to the impact of the electoral college, in designing a project this needed to be considered.  Conceptually, if I was completely unaware of the result or that Florida proved to be the deciding state, I would likely start my project at the country-wide level.  If I was starting the project blind, with no bias or assumptions, finding out which states were critical to the outcome and then doing a more detailed (county level) analysis on them.  In this case because I have prior knowledge and assumptions, Florida is going to be the focus of more detailed study.