✚ Mistaken Error

Welcome to issue 218 of The Process, where we look closer at how the charts get made. I’m Nathan Yau, and this week I was bemused by what seems like a standard bar chart at a glance but something much less when you look closer.

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✚ Editing Carefully and That White House Bar Chart with the Weird y-axis – The Process 175

Welcome to issue #175 of The Process, the newsletter for FlowingData members about how the charts get made. I’m Nathan Yau, and this week I’m thinking about a bar chart from the White House with a messed up y-axis and whether the error was intentional or not.

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Data problems in Iowa caucus results

It wasn’t just issues with an app. There appears to be many more problems with the Iowa caucus results. The Upshot broke it down with a closer look at the data:

Some of these inconsistencies may prove to be innocuous, and they do not indicate an intentional effort to compromise or rig the result. There is no apparent bias in favor of the leaders Pete Buttigieg or Bernie Sanders, meaning the overall effect on the winner’s margin may be small.

But not all of the errors are minor, and they raise questions about whether the public will ever get a completely precise account of the Iowa results. With Mr. Sanders closing to within 0.1 percentage points with 97 percent of 1,765 precincts reporting, the race could easily grow close enough for even the most minor errors to delay a final projection or raise doubts about a declared winner.

When did voting get so complicated?

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Millions of dollars in tax breaks — because of a mapping error

A small discrepancy in a couple of shapefiles led to a misclassification of land. Wealthy investors are taking advantage. For ProPublica, Jeff Ernsthausen and Justin Elliott:

They have President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax overhaul law to thank. The new law has a provision meant to spur investment into underdeveloped areas, called “opportunity zones.” The idea is to grant lucrative tax breaks to encourage new investment in poor areas around the country, carefully selected by each state’s governor.

But Port Covington, an ambitious development geared to millennials to feature offices, a hotel, apartments, and shopping, is not in a census tract that is poor. It’s not a new investment. And the census tract only became eligible to be an opportunity zone thanks to a mapping error.

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