So you want a election map?

You will need

A topojson file showing the boundaries of voting districts in your jurisdiction. You'll probably need to find a shapefile (.shp) of these boundaries, perhaps from a board of elections or government data portal, and convert it to the topojson format (look in the 'Converting Data' section of this useful tutorial). Save this file as data/precinct-boundaries.json.
A Google Spreadsheet matching the format of this one, but with your own candidates and results. A starting point for demographic data about voting districts is the US Census Bureau's American FactFinder website, where you'll need to select the geographic type 'Voting District' from the advanced search interface.

You can easily customize

The header and footer in the index.html file.
The Google Analytics tracking code in the index.html file.
The location of your Google Spreadsheet in the update-data.rb file.
The REFRESH_DELAY in the js/main.js file to enable automatic refreshing of data.
The TOOLTIP_DESCRIPTION in the js/main.js file to customize how a voting district is identified with additional information from the vtd spreadsheet (i.e. to describe "Precinct 48" as "North Springfield").
The AVAILABLE_FILTERS in the js/main.js file to customize the filtering options based on the data you have available.

To get started

Easiest way to host the map is by using Github Pages.
Run the command ./update-data.rb from the project directory in order to grab the latest data from your Google Spreadsheet (you'll either need a Mac or need a Linux machine with Ruby installed). Alternatively, you can download your Google Spreadsheet as a CSV file and replace the data in the data/ directory.

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Add a civic.json file

A civic.json file provides information about this project that's not included in the Github metadata. The full details of the format are here. Just put it in the root of your repo and we'll automatically display that info on the projects page.

Code for DC also has a tool to help put the file together here, and a validator to make sure everything's in the right place here.

(Also, since Code for DC is tracking this project, any issues tagged with help wanted will show up on http://codefordc.org/projects/helpwanted.html. If you are stuck on something, try that!)

Comments on pre-release of map solicited from DC-CFA Listserv

The position of the map kind of fights with the ability to see the dashboard w/ the actual data. The main issue is that you have to shift your browser resolution to get the full map and the dashboard in the same view.
There is also some weirdness w/ displaying the hover-over data in the dash because it means you have to roll over and off to see how the location compares to the totality of returns at that moment.
Specifically, if you have it, metadata about the district would be great, like what ward it is in, how many votes are actually coming from that precinct, maybe some select data that is also feeding the filters that you have on the side (which are awesome).

Just my thoughts. Really looking forward to this.