**There is no Tableau Public link; all project visualizations are in this post.**

This project is about quantifying both my election-related anxiety and some of my participation in electoral politics this year. I know that when I’m anxious about politics, I tend to give more money to candidates I want to have in office. I give in increments of about $5 to $25, so am definitely what the fundraising office kindly calls a “grassroots donor.” After noticing in the middle of September that I had donated about $150 worth of small donations in less than two weeks, I decided I should probably find another way of getting involved, or my wallet would be noticeably lighter by Election Day. I began researching get-out-the-vote postcard writing, which felt like a manageable place to jump in.

My original plan was to make my own postcards (see below for more on that), but I quickly found that there is a science to GOTV postcarding. The last thing I wanted to do was turn off a potential voter with my DIY GOTV efforts, so I decided to go with an established source for my postcards. Additionally, since I was starting pretty late in the game with only 6 weeks until Election Day and lots of early voting expected, I wanted to maximize the number of postcards I could send as soon as possible.

On September 23rd, I woke up, as I sometimes do, around 5am having a climate apocalypse nightmare. So fun! That prompted me to 1. donate money to a couple politicians who believe in science and 2. order 200 postcards and stamps from The Sunrise Movement, a youth-led organization that aims to tackle climate change and inequality as the massively overlapping issues they are, through direct action. A lot of the negative emotions I experience about climate change relate to being young and feeling like my future is being taken away from me; on the flip side, it feels very positive to me to participate in a movement led by other young people. In the end, Sunrise received many more orders than expected (woohoo!) and supply chain issues + me changing locations meant that I only received 100 postcards.

But I wrote them all! The rectangles on the chart below represent postcards I wrote, each red dot loosely measures the anxiety level I felt that day, and the little dollar symbols appear on each day I made a (small) contribution to a campaign. (FYI, the visualization is postcard-sized and definitely inspired by Dear Data.)

FRONT:

BACK:

A challenge of handmade data viz was not being able to edit once I committed to the pen lines — for one thing, I ended up without a good spot for a title, so I left it off to keep things uncluttered. Another piece of data I collected that I didn’t find a satisfying way to display is the time it took me per postcard. The fastest I could write and address a card was just under 3 minutes, but most cards took me on average about 5 minutes. This is in part because I knew I was more likely to finish all 100 cards if I made it more enjoyable by watching bad TV while doing it, hence the Gilmore Girls cards. (Side note: there is nothing like mindlessly absorbing hours of Gilmore Girls to make me appreciate just how awful and derivative TV was allowed to be when you had to wait a week between episodes and every creative decision was funneled through a major network. We are so lucky now *sob emoji*)

I got 100 postcards and stamps from Sunrise, and messed up on three of the postcards. I still had those three stamps, though, so I decided to send just three homemade postcards and make it to 100. Although I was hesitant to send a lot of homemade postcards, the design I made had actually been vetted by another and organizer from Postcards to Voters, which also does GOTV postcarding and has each volunteer provide their own postcards. I figured it was better to send 3 homemade, politically neutral cards (with a sneaky data viz!), than to send nothing at all.

I also only made 3 postcards because of my less-than-ideal printing conditions. The postcards are linoleum prints (see below for the print block). I didn’t have any printing ink with me and used acrylic paint instead, and there is already another carving on the back of this piece of linoleum. Unfortunately, both of those factors contribute to making the print quite muddy, but hopefully the three people who got these ones appreciate the DIY!

The prints were a lot of work — it took me about 5-6 hours to design and carve my linoleum block, and about 1.5 hours to print and paint 5 postcards. But, like the postcard-writing, those hours actually helped me to feel better and less anxious, so it didn’t feel like a burden to spend more time on them. (I decided to carve this linoleum block instead of watching the first presidential debate, for one thing.)

And for those keeping track (me), I put on Gossip Girl while carving the linoleum block. Common theme: the TV has to be bad enough that I’m not tempted to actually watch it while I work.

Next up? I definitely want to know how people are voting in Cary, NC. I want to know what youth voter turnout is like, particularly in swing states. I’d like to make more linoleum cuts of different designs and print them more cleanly. And next week, I’d really, really, really, like to be sending some postcards to government officials-elect who will soon be in office working to un-f*ck our future.