Politico Europe provides voting insight with Microsoft Power BI

Politico Europe, a joint venture between the American media organisation Politico and German publisher Axel Springer, is providing voting insights into the election process with Microsoft Power BI. 

The platform, now called Poll of Polls, aims to show European Union citizens how their votes affect political outcomes. It offers interactive data visualisations built with the Microsoft solution and provides political news stories and analyses of votes within each of the EU’s 28 member states. 

“In countries where turnout is notoriously low, like some Eastern European countries, it didn’t take many votes in May to shift a Member of the European Parliament and to have her lose a seat or win a seat,” said Etienne Bauvir, director of business intelligence and technology at Politico Europe. “That’s one thing we wanted to make evident to readers – the impact of one vote can be big in some countries.”

Power BI features interactive tools to manoeuvre polling or election data so that users can more easily understand election night results or votes still to come.  

For example, one visualisation shows a graph of polling data in the UK for the new parliament elections on 12 December 2019. “By moving a cursor left and right, readers can view how the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties have performed in polling each day from late 2018 to present,” Bill Briggs wrote in a recent Microsoft Transform news story. 

Find out more about the election-coverage hub.