NewsBeast Labs

For our election coverage we wanted to show a mix of commentary and live information on the night of. Live commentary means video as well as a chat component but the hardest part was delivering live data results without having the page to refresh, which would interrupt the
video and be entirely too slow.

To solve that problem, we’re using CartoDB’s real-time election map which lets us make changes to our data on the backend and have the results fade in as results are pushed to our readers. We added a few details such as number tallies that tick up one by one so readers can see changes when a lot of states are called at once. We also made the numbers of recently called states to green so that you can see at a glance which states were newly called this round.

As a contingency we also have some views in place that will kick in automatically in case a state is marked as “Disputed” or if it ends in a tie.

After tonight, the map will live on here. We hope you like it!

-michael