Election Maps. 

I guess I should write something verbose and annoyingly liberal about the victory for sanity last Tuesday… But that will have to wait till i have some energy to do so ;) … that and everyone else on the planet seems to be covering it very well (see, kos, AmericaBlog, etc… etc… etc…)

I’d like to share though, what I’ve been waiting for all week after the election.
The maps.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/

This guy, at University of Michican has for the last two elections been making maps based on electorial votes and population density, and cross referencing them against the real “popular” vote numbers. Red vs Blue shows a very ‘black and white’ view of the country, and its very difficult to show how many people really voted for that guy, or the other. The large geographic sizes of some states in comparison to others throws off their perceived value, when seen just in a visual.

Its a little better when you get the chance to see a table of numbers, but then you lose the value and power of a map.

His response is perfect.

The states are colored red or blue to indicate whether a majority of their voters voted for the Republican candidate, John McCain, or the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, respectively. Looking at this map it gives the impression that the Republicans won the election handily, since there is rather more red on the map than there is blue. In fact, however, the reverse is true – the Democrats won by a substantial margin. The explanation for this apparent paradox, as pointed out by many people, is that the map fails to take account of the population distribution. It fails to allow for the fact that the population of the red states is on average significantly lower than that of the blue ones. The blue may be small in area, but they represent a large number of voters, which is what matters in an election.

We can correct for this by making use of a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of states are rescaled according to their population. That is, states are drawn with size proportional not to their acreage but to the number of their inhabitants, states with more people appearing larger than states with fewer, regardless of their actual area on the ground. On such a map, for example, the state of Rhode Island, with its 1.1 million inhabitants, would appear about twice the size of Wyoming, which has half a million, even though Wyoming has 60 times the acreage of Rhode Island.

Here are the 2008 presidential election results on a population cartogram of this type:

The result of this cartogram shows the value of each state in a measurement of how large their population is, yet keeping their position relative to each other.
This gives us a much better idea of how many people voted for each person running for office, while also looking at where they live.

Take a closer look at his maps, as there are a lot of other views he shows, including the popular vote color map, which ranges from red to blue showing how truly purple our nation is.

Its a much more useful view of how our nation is, politicaly, and how the population effects the out come of the election.