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Google puts French election result onto Google Earth (for some)

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Francophone versions of Google Earth are showing detailed results of the first round of presidential elections in France, held last night, as a default layer — so reports French cartography blog Renalid, with plenty of screenshots.

This layer is not available in other language versions of Google Earth, though there is a special page on Google Earth’s Francophone site that provides the layer as a standalone file. (Except that for me, at least, the standalone file only contains a popup for Paris, and results are still pending.)

And as a student of global politics, I really would love these results in my English language version of Google Earth by default (if not turned on, necessarily). In addition, language choice is a bad determinant of national affiliation. Lots of Belgians, Canadians and Africans speak French. Lots of Frenchmen have English versions of Google Earth. Trying to guess what news is interesting to people based on their choice of download language is as fraught with risk as trying to guess what measurement system people use from their IP address. Read Michael Jones’s comment — there is an obvious solution. Apologies for the lapse.

5 thoughts on “Google puts French election result onto Google Earth (for some)”

  1. I didn’t find the standalone file on the page you pointed to but i was able to see the layer when i switched my display language inside my google earth “english version” to french.

  2. I did that by using language choice menu in TOOLS==>OPTIONS===>GENERAL

  3. Alas, that is an option not available in the Mac version of Google Earth — which is my default client.

  4. But thanks for the reminder — Windows clients do indeed have an easy way of accessing the layer.

  5. Just change your layer selector from “core” (standard for your locale) to “all”, and the French election results will be there for you to enjoy.

    P.S. You may remember the comments about “should election coverage be on or off by default” and “this only concerns the one country” from our first effort in this area (USA congressional elections.) Maybe we were right that major political-process events in major countries are in fact major news worldwide. ;-)

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