The Huffington Post has rolled out a brand new web application designed to place visitors directly at the center of midterm elections analysis: their brand new dashboard style “Election Board.” The Election Board displays numerous different charts in keeping with current polling—updated in real time—by mining the depths of social networks for how the population feels about the candidates. The Viralheat dashboard displays charts that attempt to portray attitudes by picking out positive and negative mentions of up-and-coming politicians from their electorates.

“It’s a very exciting time to be covering elections, as new media make possible fresh ways of tracking races—and of deepening our understanding of them,” said Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post. “Our new Election Dashboard offers a multi-dimensional approach to the midterms, including the latest polls, news, and opinion, as well as a look at how candidates are trending on social sites. We’re pleased to offer our users a dynamic, real-time approach to covering the November elections, and we’re also delighted to be partnering with Aristotle on our expanded HuffPost Fundracetools, and Viralheat on our innovative campaign social tracking feature.”

One example running right now is for the race between Shelby and Barnes for Alabama Senate. The Viralheat chart displays a series of dots—red and blue—for each day of the week with a line graph displaying the number of positive (or negative) mentions on social media for each of the candidates. As of this moment Barnes has more total positive mentions than Shelby; but as of today Barnes seems to have fallen to only 3 mentions whereas Shelby appears to have perhaps 7. As the site doesn’t run Flash (to make it more approachable for mobile handsets) it doesn’t interact with my cursor to tell me the actual number, as a result I must guesstimate the number the dot represents.

One thing about elections that I can say for sure is that people really love to be in the thick of it. This sort of dashboard on Huffpo is going to give visitors exactly that—the feeling that they can armchair quarterback the election and keep abreast of who’s doing well vs who’s falling in the social consciousness. Normally this sort of information would be delivered by television news outlets, running their own charts, commentary, and scrollers but publishers like Huffpo can get in on the gig by publishing to mobile phones.

I wonder if there’s an app for that. (There probably is.)

The combination of social network data mining with data from polls makes for an extremely powerful look into the social consciousness surrounding the election races. And, in a big way, it allow for a different cross-section of the population than phone and Internet poll voting because the statistics will not suffer from audience specific skew such as when a television show asks people to phone in their favorite candidate and make guesses that way. It literally takes the need to run overhead on polls out of the hands of Huffpost and lets the social media sphere develop its own “thoughts” on the matter. This is the central prospect of what is being newly minted as “data-journalism” taking diverse sources of data, crunching them with a service, and then opening the floodgates to the public.

Viralheat pulls from diverse sources from Twitter, Google Buzz, Facebook, and more, giving them an extremely broad stroke when looking for mentions of candidates. It will be interesting to see how well their service’s revelations from social networks reflect the end results of the elections.