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The U.S. presidential elections are right around the corner and it seems that just about everyone is looking for news, poll results, and other political coverage both online and off. For those of you who are still eagerly devouring anything related to the elections, you'll want to check out these five tools for visualizing election data. From earmarks to electoral votes, there's a lot you can learn from the apps listed here.

What we thought might have been an AIR app in the making, may be something entirely different. With social video sharing sites such as Youtube and Vimeo it can be hard to keep the recommendations flowing. Hundreds of videos are added to these sites daily, but only a select few are really worth our time. With no easy way to sort through these uploads, Vimeo is asking the community for help in finding a solution. Today the site has announced the launch of Vimeo Toys. These toys aims to give users an interactive and visually appealing way to find more video content. Here's a look at what's available.

Cover flow is one of the slickest designs ever made by Apple. There's no doubt that it gives a whole new meaning to album art and even makes users more appreciative of album covers. However, what if you could go beyond your album covers and do the same for your Flickr images? Well we have the perfect app to do the job and it's called FotoViewr.

The wonderful Information Aesthetics blog points us to human-computer interaction student Chris Harrison's Digg Rings visualization. Digg Rings is the latest in a series of awesome visualization projects from Harrison, and it displays a year's worth of Digg data in an absolutely stunning manner. These are interactive visualizations like those from Digg Labs, but they're equally beautiful and would make one heck of a poster.

Last.fm is a great music service that keeps track of your listening habits. Though you can view stats such as last played tracks, top artists, or most played songs with just words and numbers, it can be limiting in so many ways. We're huge fans of visualization tools, so wouldn't it be cool if you could grab a visual history of your Last.fm stats? LastGraph is just the service for the job.

VisualComplexity.com is a site that intends to be a unified resource space for the visualization of complex networks. Their main goal is to better understand the different types of visualization methods used across several different disciplines, including social networks and the World Wide Web. Although this site is not new, with all the discussion around the idea of a "social graph," it's a good time to revisit what VisualComplexity has to offer. With the social graph, we're attempting to map everyone to everyone and show how they are connected. This is no minor undertaking.