Description
The House of Representatives has 435 members, elected for a two year term in single-seat constituencies. House of Representatives elections are held every two years on the first Tuesday after November 1 in even years. The Democratic Party and Republic party are the two major existing political parties in the United States. My objective here is to provide a summary of the loss or gain of seats in the House among these parties from the year 1970-2010, by creating an interactive graphical tool. This tool will help both teachers and students. The students can learn about the US House elections in an interactive way. With this tool, users can see the map of the United States of America and can click on the states and districts shown on the map using various tools to see the electoral trends for the specific state/district for the past years. A coloring scheme indicating red for Republicans and blue for Democrats has been implemented to get a clear idea on the change of party along district boundaries. The users will be able to see the trends of House election results in past years for all districts in the matrix using a hotlink tool; the coloring scheme is implemented in the matrix for easy distinction between democrats and republicans. A user can also select the year, see the map of US states with the congressional district boundaries and select a district to view election results and representative for the selected year and district using the identify tool. The tool provides a graph explaining the gerrymandering of the House Elections. Over 90% of House members are reelected every two years, due to lack of electoral competition. The tool has been developed in JAVA using MOJO (Map Objects Java Objects) library. MOJO is developed by ESRI (Environmental Science Research Institute). The major features shown on the map were designed using MOJO. MOJO made it easy to incorporate the tabular data with these features.
