How to create an election donut

Available on all plans:
  • Free
  • Pro
  • Business
  • Enterprise

The election donut chart is a good choice to show shares of seats in a legislative body. You can show what parties have been elected, how many parties there are, and how they compare to each other. This chart type is based on the donut chart, but shows absolute values rather than 100%.

Here is our sample chart. Let's go through the steps on how to prepare the data and customize the chart.

If you want to create this chart type, your data needs to be in a certain format. You'll need:

  • One header row containing descriptive labels ("Party", "Seats", etc.)
  • One column with party names.
  • One column containing numeric values. The values in this column will define the size of the election donut segment. There will be as many segments as there are rows in the data.

Here's the data we used to create the chart at the top of the page:

Groups Seats
The Left 45
S&D 135
Greens/EFA 53
Renew 78
EPP 184
ECR 84
PfE 85
ESN 27
Non-attached 28

Once you have prepared your data, create a new chart in Datawrapper. You can do so by going to our homepage and clicking on Start creating. In step 1: Upload, you can copy & paste your dataset, upload it as a .csv or Excel file, or connect to a Google Sheet. It will look like this:

Click Proceed at the bottom right to go to the next step.

In the second step, you can check if your dataset was imported correctly and make changes to it – if necessary. If you did not upload a header row, you have to untick First row as label to avoid losing your first row of data. Always remember to do this if you don't have descriptive row and column headers.

In step 2: Check & Describe, your data looks like this. You can see that Datawrapper correctly recognized your numbers as numbers (and not as text or dates) because they are colored in blue and are right-aligned. To learn more about Datawrapper's automatic recognition of data formats, visit this article.

To add a unit (like "members") to your numbers, click on a column header and then add the unit of your choice to the Prepend/append options on the left. You can learn more about adding units to numbers here.

Click on Proceed at the bottom left to go to step 3: Visualize.

In this step and under the tab Chart type, you will see a list of the available chart types. Chances are that your data will automatically be displayed as a line chart. To change that, click on the Election Donut symbol in the grid of available chart types:

You will now see an election donut without a title, descriptions or customized colors. Maybe you want to further refine and annotate this donut chart. Besides Chart type, you'll notice three more tabs in this step: Refine, Annotate, and Layout.

In any tab of step 3: Visualize, you can click, hold, and drag the arrow in the lower right corner to scale the chart window or manually determine the dimensions of the chart by entering values in the boxes below the chart (Size).

We recommend checking what the chart looks like on different screen sizes multiple times while designing it, by clicking on the little icons (mobile, tablet, and computer) below the chart.

Learn more about changing the width and height of your chart in this article.

The Appearance panel lets you choose the colors of your slices. One strength of the Datawrapper election chart is that you use the exact colors of the parties being presented, which is important for making the results instantly recognizable for your readers.

  • Base color: sets one color for all slices. Datawrapper then uses different shades of it, so readers can still tell the slices apart. (We don't recommend this. Instead:)
  • Set colors…: lets you give each slice its own color. Under Select element(s), click on one or several slices, then pick a new color under Choose a color. To select many slices at once, use all, none, or invert below the list. Reset undoes the change for the selected slices, and Reset all changes undoes all of them. In an election donut, readers expect each party to show up in its own color.

The Slices panel lets you decide how many slices your election donut shows and in which order.

  • Group after: combines all slices after this number into one. That helps if you have many small parties that would otherwise be hard to see. Our chart has nine groups, so we set it to 9, and no slices get combined.
  • Group label: names the slice that combines the small parties. The default is "Other".
  • Sort by size: sorts the slices from largest to smallest instead of showing them in the order of your dataset (the default). In an election donut, the order often matters: Many parliaments seat their groups from left to right, and readers expect to see them that way. So if you want a specific order, sort the rows in your data instead, like we did.

The election chart is an exception to the rule of "don't show more than x slices in your pie/donut chart." It is commonly used as a visualization for parliaments – and often, all parties have to be shown. If the number of parties makes this chart type hard to read, choose a bar chart instead.

The Labels panel lets you change how the numbers on your slices look. There's only one setting here, the Number format. It lets you choose how the numbers next to the party names appear, for example "1,000" or "1k". Learn more about all available number formats here.

In the Annotate tab, you're first asked to give your visualization a title, description, notes, source, byline, and an alternative description for screen readers. You can find a detailed explanation of all these Annotate options here.

In the 2nd panel in the Annotate tab, we can emphasize certain donut slices. All the other donut slices will then tone down in their color. To remove added elements, click on the little "x" at the left of the text in the blue button.

In the Layout tab, you can select an output locale, change the design theme and footer options, and enable social sharing. Find a detailed explanation of all the Layout options here.

In step 4: Publish & Embed, you can first publish your chart and then decide how it gets to your readers. We recommend pasting the embed code into your website or CMS, but you can also share the chart's URL. Learn more about both options here. To use your chart somewhere else, download it as a PNG (on any plan) or as an SVG or PDF (on paid plans). See what each plan includes on our pricing page.

And that's it! You've successfully created and customized an election donut.

Last updated on October 29th, 2026