Category: mapping

In July 2020, the United States Supreme Court unanimously decided that states can require electors to support the winner of their popular vote. Those who don’t may be punished with a faithless elector fine or by being removed from the post altogether. Now, a faithless elector is not one who eschews religion. The term refers to a member of the U.S. Electoral College who doesn’t vote for the presidential or vice-presidential candidate they had pledged to vote for. That is, they break faith with the candidate they were pledged to and vote for another candidate, or fail to vote altogether.

Historically, political parties have been successful at keeping their electors faithful. But that makes the 165 cases of faithless electors all the more interesting, whether the reasoning is the death of a candidate, a form of protest, or even a simple spelling mistake. In the wake of SCOTUS’s monumental decision, let’s take a look back at the elections with faithless electors.

View Faithless electors in a full screen map

After cross-referencing Wikipedia’s List of faithless electors with FairVote.org‘s list, we identified 165 faithless electors. We note their name (if available), political affiliation, and the presidential or vice-presidential candidate (or non-candidate!) they voted for instead. You may sort the map by election year or party. Alternatively, read on for insights on the election years with the most faithless electors in U.S. history.

Election Years With Faithless Electors in the Double-Digits

As of 2016, there have been 20 elections with at least one faithless elector. Several elections even saw 10 or more faithless electors. When combined, these double-digit elections account for over 76% of the faithless electors, so let’s take a closer look.

• 1872 – 63 faithless electors
• 1832 – 30
• 1836 – 23
• 2016 – 10

The many faithless electors of 1872 were due to the death of the Liberal Republican Party’s nominee for president. Horace Greeley passed away before the Electoral College could vote, so 63 of the 66 electors pledged to him voted for other candidates. The year saw the most faithless electors in U.S. history, more than double even the next most.

The election of 1832 resulted in the first of many faithless electors who had issues with Martin Van Buren or his running-mate. That year, 30 electors from Pennsylvania refused to support Democratic V.P. candidate Martin Van Buren. Four years later in 1836, 23 Virginia electors pledged to Van Buren (for President) and Richard Johnson (for Vice President) abstained from voting for Johnson. This was the first abstention in faithless elector history.

Then there’s the 144-year gap between the previous most recent election to have faithless elector numbers in the double-digits (1872) and 2016. Ten electors worked to alter the result of the election in 2016. The electors consisted of eight Democrats and two Republicans. Now, let’s break down the political parties of faithless electors and the states they were supposed to represent.

Demographics: States and Parties of Faithless Electors

With 165 instances of faithless electing, there have to be some commonalities—perhaps location and party? Let’s go over the demographics of past faithless electors.

Electors From These States Are the Most Faithless

You know the saying “Never trust an elector from Pennsylvania“? Well, neither do we, but if the phrase ever caught on, it would be based on truth. Of the 165 faithless electors in total, 31 represented the Keystone State.

As for other states with plenty of faithless electors? Virginia has been the home state of 24 of these electors while both Missouri and Georgia have had 15. But what about the political party of these electors?

The Faithlessness of This Party is Elect-rifying

Of the six distinct political parties on the map, the party most faithless electors align with is that of the Democrats. In fact, 73 of the 165 faithless electors in U.S. history lean left. The party with the second-most of these electors is the Liberal Republican party; 63 members were faithless in the 1872 election.

Republicans have had 14 faithless electors while the other parties represented include Democratic-Republicans, the People’s Party, and Federalists with under 10 each.

Election Years Without Faithless Electors

Based on the previous information, you might think there’s at least one faithless elector in every election. However, this is not the case. There are several elections in U.S. history sans a single dissenting elector.

Notably missing on the graph are the Obama years. The elections with zero faithless electors this century took place in 2012 and 2008 when Barack Obama was on the ticket. Although to be fair, the one faithless elector in 2004 likely made a spelling mistake. The anonymous Minnesota elector cast a presidential vote for the V.P. candidate “John Ewards” [sic], rather than John Kerry. As a result, Minnesota amended its law so that votes cast for someone other than the candidate to whom the elector is pledged are invalidated.

Other notable election years when faithless electors were absent include 1964, which broke up what might otherwise have been a streak of six elections with faithless electors. As for the longest streak of elections sans this type of electors? From 1944 until 1916 (eight elections in a row) there were no instances of faithless electing. Another long streak occurred further back from 1868 to 1844, or seven election cycles long.

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There has only ever been one election in which faithless electors changed the result (1836, though even that was fruitless as the V.P. candidate, Richard Johnson, was ultimately voted in by Congress). However, it’s still cool to look back on the history of faithless electors as there’s likely to be significantly fewer in the future thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling.

For more election-related maps, read about the Births and Burials of US Presidents or the birthplaces of V.P.s, The President Abroad: International Travels Of U.S. Presidents, and Presidential Assassination Attempts Mapped. Otherwise, elect to make a map today at batchgeo.com.

If you’re attending an out-of-town class reunion or an eventful wedding, wouldn’t it be nice to see the locations you’ll need to attend in one place? After all, there are nearby hotel options and other accommodations you may need to remember. Since this information is location-dependent, a single map with multiple locations would be ideal.

Knowing how to map multiple locations on Google Maps can come in handy on occasions like these and many more. Whatever your reason, you can use BatchGeo to map multiple locations on Google Maps. It’s a straightforward process:

1. Gather your multiple locations in a spreadsheet
2. Copy and paste your spreadsheet into BatchGeo
3. Customize the multiple locations on your map

With these three steps, you’ll know how to map multiple locations on Google Maps, resulting in custom maps like the one below.

View Make a Map of My Location and Favorite Places in a full screen map

But wait, BatchGeo isn’t the same as Google Maps—or is it? BatchGeo uses the Google Maps Geocoding API to map and display your multiple locations on Google Maps. Geocoding is the process of converting addresses, cities, states, zip or postal codes into mappable coordinates. The result of using the Google Maps Geocoding API through BatchGeo? A customizable Google Maps map that doesn’t require you to write any code or manually geocode addresses one by one like you may have to do with other services. BatchGeo performs everything you need to do in a few easy steps, starting with gathering the multiple locations you want to map in a spreadsheet.

Gather Multiple Locations in a Spreadsheet

To start mapping your multiple locations, you’ll need to add them to a spreadsheet like Excel or Google Sheets. You can add up to 25,000 locations to a spreadsheet that will be turned into a map with BatchGeo Pro, or up to 250 locations with the free version.

One best practice for formatting multiple locations in a spreadsheet for mapping purposes includes adding at least two columns. One column can be for the name or title of your locations while the second can be for your location data, as shown below.

With just the names and multiple locations, you can create a basic map like the one below:

View Basic Map of Multiple Locations in a full screen map

But, seeing how you have multiple locations, you may want to make your map easier for yourself and any others to navigate. Enter map grouping. With map grouping, you can filter your map by certain markers, allowing you to focus on what matters.

With numerical data, map grouping can automatically identify various ranges so that you can filter out what you don’t want to see at that moment. With non-numerical data, it groups fields with the same values, allowing you to see the commonalities in your data. This is especially useful for types or categories. For example, we assigned our multiple locations common types like beach, coffee shop, restaurant, and workout, as shown below.

With names or titles, addresses, or other location data, and types or categories of the multiple locations in your spreadsheet, it’s time to move onto step two of how to map multiple locations on Google Maps: copying and pasting your data into BatchGeo.

Copy and Paste Into BatchGeo

Using our mapping tool, you can just copy and paste in your spreadsheet. Then, click “Map Now” which will allow you to validate & set your options. You don’t need to customize the map—if your data is simple, you can probably skip the options completely. However, they allow you to fine-tune the headings, which is especially useful if you have multiple location columns.

Note the basic options first:

• Region
• Location / Address
• City / County
• State / Province / Postcode
• Zip / Postcode / Country
• Group By / Thematic Value

Identify the region of your data, and set the Location / Address to the correct column from the spreadsheet you copied and pasted. Do the same for the rest of the location values if you had different columns with city, state, zip, or country data. Finally, if you assigned types or categories to your data in the spreadsheet, select the column you’d like BatchGeo to group by. After the basic options are set, you can scroll down and click Save & Continue or select Show Advanced Options under the basic options you’ve identified to further customize your map.

Customize the Multiple Locations on Your Map

BatchGeo allows you to further customize your maps after you set the basic options. Additional fields you can change related to the data you copy and pasted from your spreadsheet include the Title of the location marker, the Marker Description, Country Field, and Image URL, among others.

In addition to those fields, you can choose to label your multiple locations with letters or numbers. You also have the option to enable clustering for high-density markers which, if you have multiple locations on a single map, maybe a good idea.

You can even customize the map style—pick from six different background options for your map. Finally, for further customization, select your marker shape and marker color. We offer three marker shape options: the standard map point marker, a circle, and a square. Then, you can determine which colors you want to assign with each of the grouped types or categories or, select one marker color for a map with no grouping options.

Share Your Map

Once you’ve saved your map, pick a title, an optional description, determine your ideal privacy, and select the Map Mode: Data View displays the data used to create your map below it while the Store Locator is a good option if you’d like to display your data on a list that appears to the left of your map. Read more about creating a store locator here.

Then, you can opt to share your map of multiple locations with friends, family, colleagues, or even on social media by copy and pasting the link to your map of multiple locations you made with BatchGeo. Visit here for more ways to share your maps.

The summer months bring children home from school and popsicles to the stores. But it’s not all sunshine and long, lazy days come May and June. Unfortunately, summers also bring weather conducive to unplanned and unwanted wildfires.

In the last decade, an average of 64,100 wildfires occurred annually, as reported by the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC). Every year these fires collectively burn 6.8 million acres, along with countless buildings destroyed, and lives lost. The recent 2020 Western United States wildfires and the 2010 Russian wildfires were among 23 of the largest wildfires the past 10 years, which have resulted in a lot of destruction. Take a look at the map below to see where more of these massive wildfires take place.

View Largest Wildfires of the Last Decade in a full screen map

The map is based on Wikipedia data we gathered in late September 2020. You can filter the map by negative effects of the fires (acres burned, buildings destroyed, and death count) or by when the wildfire occurred (month and year). Otherwise, read on for more information.

10 Wildfires With the Most Area Burned

Wildfires result in multiple kinds of destruction, perhaps the most obvious being land. Though devastating to think about, the area burned helps provide an idea of the severity of these fires. The average football field amounts to 1.32 acres, yet by the time some of the largest wildfires were extinguished, they damaged 16,000,000 times that amount, as you’ll note below.

Name	Approx. area burned (acres)	Approx. area burned (ha)
2019–20 Australian bushfire season	16,000,000	6,300,000
2014 Northwest Territories fires	8,600,000	3,500,000
2019 Siberia wildfires	7,400,000	3,000,000
2010 Bolivia forest fires	3,700,000	1,500,000
2018 British Columbia wildfires	3,339,170	1,351,314
2017 British Columbia wildfires	3,004,930	1,216,053
2020 Western United States wildfires	2,936,960	1,188,544
2015 Russian wildfires	2,700,000	1,100,000
2019 Amazon rainforest wildfires	2,240,000	906,000
2019 Alberta wildfires	2,182,960	883,414

The table shows the 2019 Australian bushfires saw the most area burned this decade. This is nearly double the second-most, which notably took place in Canada. The Great White North was home to four of the ten largest wildfires. Specifically, British Columbia had two large fires and both the Northwest Territories and Alberta saw two each this decade.

Both Russia and Bolivia have seen their fair share of wildfires. The Siberia wildfires took place in 2019 while Russia faced similar issues with its 2015 fires. As for Bolivia, the country dealt with the 2019 Amazon rainforest fires and its 2010 forest fires are ongoing.

The only large wildfire not yet mentioned happens to be the most recent, beginning in late July 2020: the Western United States wildfires. Washington, California (where it’s known the worst statistic about the state is that 6.7 million acres burned in wildfires between 2008 and 2017) and Oregon faced the fires. While the newest addition to the top 10, these fires already burned nearly 3 million acres, though area burned isn’t the only consequence of wildfires.

Buildings Destroyed by Wildfires

In addition to land, buildings are also often burned down during a wildfire. This leaves even more to rebuild after the blaze finally dies out. While the exact number of buildings destroyed in a wildfire is not always known, there are cases with that data available.

The 2018 California wildfires destroyed 22,751 buildings, the most in recent years. 2018 was a terrible year for wildfires in California as the state’s 2018 Camp Fire saw 18,804 buildings go down, the second-most this decade. Finally, the 2020 Western U.S. wildfires are the last to result in over 4,000 destroyed. While impactful, land and buildings can be salvaged. What can’t be saved are the lives lost in these fires.

Deadliest Wildfires of the Decade

Area and buildings burned aren’t the only metrics of a wildfire’s destruction. Unfortunately, there’s also the death count—and the fires with the most land or buildings burned aren’t always the deadliest. These five wildfires saw 50 or more deaths:

1. 2018 California wildfires (103)
2. 2018 Attica wildfires (102)
3. 2018 Camp Fire (85)
4. June 2017 Portugal wildfires (66)
5. 2010 Russian wildfires (54)

Both the 2018 California and Attica wildfires resulted in a death toll of over 100 people. Northern California’s Camp Fire nearly reached that level with 85 fatalities that same year. Portugal and the 2010 Russia fires saw 66 and 54 respectively. Thankfully, at least eight of the fires had no known casualties. Now let’s move on from the trends of wildfires’ negative effects to their to date commonalities.

Largest Wildfires by Year and Month

The number of massive wildfires is increasing. The decade that began with just two large wildfires in 2010 ended with a string of scorching summer seasons.

From 2011 to 2016, there was just one large fire per year. Yet that number increased in 2017, a trend that continued the following year in 2018, the worst of the decade. 2019 also faced a similarly high amount of fires.

As for the months of the largest wildfires, you already know most have occurred throughout the summer. But which summer month(s) specifically?

The most dangerous month for the start of large wildfires has historically been July. May and August yield similarly high numbers (four each), which together, make up roughly 35% of the largest fires. When you combine all three of these months, nearly 61% of the largest fires over the last 10 years are accounted for. Find out how you can help in future wildfire seasons.

Make a Disaster Relief Map

Wildfire season is an annual occurrence that appears to be getting worse as the years go on. But fires aren’t the only life-threatening emergency we should be prepared for, as 2020 proved.

You can make maps that help others during hard times, like how a South Philly graduate student mapped free food resources in her neighborhood with the help of BatchGeo. See her map that became a pandemic resource here. Then, get a full tutorial on how you too can make a disaster relief community resource map.