Ten Colombian Election Maps in One

On the 17 June Iván Duque Márquez of the Democratic Center stood against Gustavo Petro of Humane Colombia in the second round of the Colombian Presidential election. Iván Duque Márquez received the most votes and will serve as President of Colombia from 7 August 2018 to 7 August 2022.

The Colombian Presidential Elections - Second Round is a fantastic mapped visualization of the results from the second round of the Colombian Presidential election. The map starts off with a simple choropleth view showing the winner in each electoral district. It then runs through a number of different methods for mapping the results to provide an ever more nuanced analysis of the 2018 Presidential Election.

A simple choropleth view of the results shows that Iván Duque Márquez won most northern and eastern electoral districts in Colombia. Gustavo Petro won most of the southern and eastern districts. One problem, however, with this simplistic choropleth view is that it doesn't take into account the huge population differences between different districts. Election districts in the Amazon are very large in area but have small populations. This can distort the overall picture of the election map.

The map overcomes this problem by switching to scaled circular markers for each electoral district. In this view the circles are colored to show the winning candidate in the district and are scaled in size to reflect the size of the voting population. This view reveals more geographical differences in how the country voted. Municipalities near the border with Venezuela voted mostly for Iván Duque Márquez and municipalities on the coast voted more for Gustavo Petro.

The Colombian Presidential Elections - Second Round visualization ends up by removing the map completely and reorganizing the municipality circular markers by the percentage of voters who voted for each candidate (on the horizontal plane) and by region (on the vertical plane). This makes it much easier to see how Colombia voted by region. The Pacific region voted more for Petro while regions in the center and the west of the country voted more for Iván Duque Márquez.