The Challenge
NBC News needed a way for anchors to explore election results live on air—zooming into counties, comparing historical data, and explaining vote margins in real-time. The existing tools couldn't handle the speed and flexibility required for live broadcast.
What I Built
I proposed and led development of the Big Board—the touchscreen election visualization system Steve Kornacki uses on MSNBC. Built entirely with web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, D3), which NBC believes was an industry first for broadcast election graphics.
Key capabilities:
- Multi-touch zoom to view any district, no matter how small
- Historical data for any race in the past decade
- Real-time data integration with election feeds
- Smooth enough for live TV (no lag, no crashes)
Technical Details
The system runs as an HTML5 web app in Chrome kiosk mode on a commodity gaming PC (Intel i7, ATI Radeon GPU), paired with large Planar touchscreen displays. D3.js handles all visualizations and animations.
Same codebase works on-air and embedded on NBC's web properties.
Results
- 19M+ viewers on election night 2018
- Zero crashes across multiple election cycles
- Featured in The New York Times: "A newly juiced-up model of the board that can zoom in on the most obscure House districts"
- Vulture: "Kornacki, eli5-ing races with sleeves rolled up and an 82-inch vertical touchscreen... looked amazing with the board, panning and zooming"
2016 NBC News County-Level Election Maps
