Track Voting in Real Time With Facebook and Foursquare

In many states across the country, we’ve already passed the halfway mark for voting hours in the 2012 Presidential Election. Soon, we will all know whether President Obama or Mitt Romney will le...
Track Voting in Real Time With Facebook and Foursquare
Written by Josh Wolford
  • In many states across the country, we’ve already passed the halfway mark for voting hours in the 2012 Presidential Election. Soon, we will all know whether President Obama or Mitt Romney will lead the country for the next four years (or at least have a better idea of how things are going).

    If you want to look at some maps and watch votes as they roll in, as well as get some location-based and demographic stats in real time – both Facebook and Foursquare have you covered.

    Facebook made it a point to make sure its million of users voted today. For every user of voting age, the social network displayed a voting reminder at the top of their news feeds. This reminder let users find their polling place as well as confirm that they had voted. The results of this tally are now coming in live on Facebook’s voting map.

    As of the writing of this article, 2.7 million Facebook users have confirmed their vote. Females are leading by a nearly 2 to 1 margin. Young voters are also more active both on Facebook and in the voting both. 18-34 year olds make up 60% of the users who have confirmed their vote on the site. You can check it out here.

    “The map displays bursts of activity as people share that they’re voting. The size of each burst matches the number of people voting in that region right now,” says Facebook.

    You can interact with the map by clicking a specific state:

    Foursquare is also using check-ins to aggregate voter data. Their “I Voted” map show a state-by-state picture of the real-time check-ins happening at polling places. As of now, they’ve logged over 87,000 check-ins and are reporting a 50-50 gender breakdown. You can check it out here or access it below:

    Get the WebProNews newsletter delivered to your inbox

    Get the free daily newsletter read by decision makers

    Subscribe
    Advertise with Us

    Ready to get started?

    Get our media kit