Thanks for the warm welcome. I've had a bunch of blog traffic come from this site, so I thought I'd take a look. I'm from western Canada, and I've done a fair amount of work on electoral geography.
I have poll by poll results/maps for Canada, and can match (roughly) results to my data set. It'd be a rough estimation, but it might be interesting to see. Is data available at the poll level for Australia?
Oh good! What's your blog? (You won't have enough enough posts yet to put it as a link, but if you put spaces after the dots or something...).
We have a few threads that may interest you...
Here is the 2008 poll-by-poll maps for much of Canada.
Here are demographic maps of Canada - some are provincial riding, some are federal riding, some are Census division, etc.
Here is the website of one of the posters from here, who has been a bit silent of late (he did those 2008 poll maps from the earlier link). That link is for his 2011 poll-by-poll maps across Canada.
Here is an "Australian" demographic maps thread, but it's really just maps from the state of Victoria, based on state electorate boundaries, because I didn't get any further than that. It's based off the 2006 Census, but the 2011 results are out now, so I think I'll start a new thread and do a new round of maps, based off that.
Those links (other than the 506's link) are all listed in the "Special Threads" stickied thread on the International Elections board, just down from here. I've uploaded a swag of blank Canadian election maps to the gallery - feel free to use them as you see fit for your blog, if you like them. With the exception of the Northern Territory, Australian one I uploaded last week, they're all visible for perusal in
this thread. I'm part way through a New Brunswick provincial boundaries map, but it's incomplete. I'll start on a federal one once the redistribution has been completed - if you haven't seen it already,
here is our discussion on the progression of the redistribution. Definitely take the time to check out Earl's blog - he has a link in some of his posts. He's a dipper, but quite unbiased in his electoral analysis.
Australia does have poll-level data available, but in an imprecise manner. Whereas in Canada you vote at your polling station, and each poll only records a few hundred votes, in Australia you can vote at any polling booth in your electorate, and booths near the boundary might be joint booths with the adjoining electorate. Most people will still vote at the nearest booth to them, however if you're off on a camping trip or something, or if you're working that day, you might vote at a booth you pass on the way out of town, or duck out on your lunchbreak, so it's a little less precise - and there are certainly no clearly defined boundaries for booths, so you can't map them quite the way you can in Canada. Our metropolitan booths are considerably larger than your polls, too - more likely to have a few thousand votes cast there, than a few hundred - which further decreases their effectiveness. There are some good sites that show booth locations and numbers, but it's still less precise.
This website probably provides the best examples.
EDIT: To actually include a link to
Earl's Blog.
