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Check out this interactive map to see voter turnout data for your Philly neighborhood

A senior from Temple University is using open data to help cover the presidential election for The Temple News.

The Temple News' live, by-ward voting count. Giphy

As counties across Pennsylvania are still counting votes, we’re starting to get a clearer picture of the state’s voter turnout as the nation waits for results from this and other key battleground states such as Nevada and Georgia.

On Thursday around noon, about 615,000 Philadelphia votes had been counted, and unsurprisingly, Philadelphians turned out heavily for former Vice President Joe Biden, with the candidate currently carrying about 80% of the city’s votes so far.

While it will likely be a while before we know how the city’s turnout compared to the 2016 election where about 64% of registered voters cast a ballotThe Temple News Digital Managing Editor Colin Evans began to paint a picture of where in the city voters were showing up this time around.

Evans, a senior journalism and economics major at Temple University, tweeted out this interactive map Wednesday afternoon. By hovering over your voting district (find that info here), you can see how many eligible voters turned out in this election.

Evans used R to scrape the results of the Philadelphia Election Results website which breaks info down by ward and division and organized the info into a data frame.

“Then I did a full join between that data frame and the geography data from Open Data Philly showing division and ward boundaries and uploaded the joined dataset to Flourish, which visualized the numbers based on the geographies,” he told Technical.ly.

Evans updates the map as new voting info becomes available.

And that could be a while, if you’re following along with what’s going on with the Pennsylvania courts: Around noon Thursday, Philly temporarily halted counting to accommodate a court order granting closer access to the operations for Trump campaign canvassing monitors. Counting began again about a half hour later, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported around 12:20 p.m.

Evans, who’s covering his first election for Temple’s independent student newspaper, said it’s been a difficult process because of the anxiety and uncertainty that’s unfolded.

“It’s almost surreal to see Philadelphia garnering so much attention and then to realize that our coverage is a part of what people are going to look to to understand how this election is going,” he said.

Companies: Temple University
Series: Election 2020
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