ld793
commented
2 months ago Thank you for the feedback! To address one of the concerns presented for the first visualization we wanted to show an overall year to year difference but the way it was presented was not very clear. Right after the presentation was posted we did change the plot to look at each state over time instead of each year across all states. Feel free to check it out in the comment below.
I am also in agreement with the breakdown of "voter turnout". The data that we have does not actually show voter turnout and it an approximation was created which unfortunately was not accurate. This will be reflected in the final commit of the project.
The largest limitation in the dataset was that a lot of the character data provided varied across states and how it was submitted. This added a challenge on calculated the number of physical polling locations available (since multiple precincts can be in the same physical location).
I hope this answers some of your questions and concerns!
The following is the peer review of the Presentation proposal by CristinaUAMS. The team members that participated in this review are
- Content: Is the research question well designed and is the data being used relevant to the research question? I think that the questions are well designed but the presenters mention that they are using a fixed voter turnout rate. Unfortunately, this means that they cannot actually answer the second part of the second question of how the variation in polling places impacts the voter turnout. This might be part of why some of the results seem to lack basis in reality.
- Content: Did the team use appropriate visualizations and did they interpret them accurately? Question1 is particularly difficult to compare year over year because of the ways that the data is broken up. There are a large number of categorical variables but comparing the change in a numeric variable for many categories over time doesn't seem like something best represented in this way. Lines might be better for visualizing time trends etc.. Looking at the method of plotting the distribution of polling places year over year, a similar issue arises, it can be challenging to compare bar heights across 2 variables and 5 mini-plots but a single plot with two lines changing over time would have been much easier to follow here.
In discussing access to rural vs urban polling places, there wasn't mention to the fact that even though there are more polling places in rural areas, they might be considerably further apart and require more travel to get there - a strict reading of data without interpretation.
Conclusion specifies higher concentration of polling places but that wasn't demonstrated within the data. I also found that the data was not quite what was represented by other studies (https://dailyyonder.com/lack-of-access-to-infrastructure-hurts-voter-participation-in-rural-america/2023/04/11/) Sources like the University of Wisconsin found that Rural access has been cut lately and urban/suburban voting outpaces rural voting. Secure Democracy (securedemocracyusa.org) says that half of rural polling locations serve an area over 60 square miles when compared with urban voting centers which serve areas of roughly 2 square miles.
- Creativity and Critical Thought: Is the project carefully thought out? Are the limitations carefully considered? Does it appear that time and effort went into the planning and implementation of the project? At least some limitations seem to be considered. I'm not sure that the project was carefully thought out. In the first plot, it seems a better visualization existed to more accurately represent the information. For the second question, it seems that there is some discrepancy between how the team interpreted the data and the real world in the first part of the question and for the second part of the question, examining real world impact cannot be done with fictitious numbers which does not seem to have been considered at all.
- Slides: Are the slides well organized, readable, not full of text, featuring figures with legible labels, legends, etc.? The slides are well organized and while some do contain full paragraphs of information, the charts are legible with neat legends and axes etc.
- Professionalism: How well did the team present? Does the presentation appear to be well practiced? Are they reading off of a script? Did everyone get a chance to say something meaningful about the project? The team presented well and seemed to know exactly when each person was meant to speak. They did not seem to be reading off a script but merely presenting their findings, each presenting one question and some introduction and conclusion.