This map is a representation of people on Facebook who clicked an Election Day prompt to share with their friends that they're voting in the 2012 US election.

With the approaching 2012 election, Facebook engaged AREA 17 to realize an ambitious project to further socialize the political process. The result is a real time visualization of live voting data provided directly by Facebook users. And it’s the first of its kind! Check it out at facebookstories.com/vote.

On election day, Facebook users can merge civic duty with social interaction. The map displays bursts of activity as people share that they’re voting. The size of each burst matches the number of people voting in that region right now. The histogram shows a record of activity over time, with an additional breakdown by gender and age.

Within the first few hours of the launch, we’ve served up over 100,000 page views with 6,500 active visitors. A proud achievement for everyone involved! This initiative is part of a larger project that we realized for Facebook called Facebook Stories.