Land Doesn't Vote... People Do.

Our methods of electoral cartography are flawed. Election maps often mislead their audience, confusing land area with number of votes.

Election Maps on Social Media


2016 Election Maps

These two maps once again demonstrate how election maps can be misleading. Both of these maps show a considerable amount of red which will often mislead people into believing that Donald Trump won the popular vote when, in fact, he did not.


2020 Election Map

This type of election map is even more common than the election maps above. Instead of showing red/blue gradients that represent vote margins, this map shows only one shade of red or blue to demonstrate which candidate won a state. This exacerbates the issue and confuses the actual election results. Joe Biden won the 2020 election, but if the average United States Citizen were to be shown this map without context, they would assume that the republican won. These election maps do not help the audience draw accurate conclusions because it depicts land area without reference to population density. Take Los Angeles, California and the state of Wyoming, for example. The city of Los Angeles is about 500 square miles and contains nearly 4 million people. The entire state of Wyoming is nearly 98,000 square miles and only contains roughly 500,000 people. There may be more red than blue on the map, but that has very little to do with the population of the United States or who the electorate chose in the popular vote.


The Cartogram Cube


Solutions


Election Visualization

This way to visualize election data for the most part maintains the shape of the country and it does an excellent job of visually representing the population of the United States. The main trade-off is the topography of the country. I believe that the trade-off is entirely worth making. In order for a map to be accessible to the average citizen, I think that we need to maintain shape, something that the cartogram fails to do. This visualization of election results is easy for the public to read and offers quite a bit of information. It accurately depicts population density and fairly demonstrates the results of elections. It shows that most democratic voters are clustered in big cities with republican-leaning surrounding suburbs. While this map is not perfect, in my opinion, it does the best job of conveying election results to the public while contributing least to the widespread problem of misunderstandings and misinformation.


Conclusion

If even educated and interested people cannot accurately draw conclusions about election results from a standard electoral map, then our most common methods of electoral cartography are deeply flawed and must be changed to benefit the understanding of the average citizen. That is where we currently stand in terms of our typical election maps. They are confusing and often mislead people. Of course, in cartography, there is always a tradeoff, as demonstrated by the Cartographic Cube. No map will be perfect, but there are other ways to present election results aside from a typical state or county map. To increase our population's understanding of elections and election results, we need to introduce the public to new and different types of election maps. Ideally, people should be able and encouraged to look at multiple maps when analyzing election results, but for the sake of people who do not avidly consume election analysis and media, and instead passively glance at the news, making a different form of election visualization our new standard can serve to increase the understanding that the average citizen has of election outcomes.


Citations

The button above will take you to a document containing all references for this project.

These two maps once again demonstrate how election maps can be misleading. Both of these maps show a considerable amount of red which will often mislead people into believing that Donald Trump won the popular vote when, in fact, he did not.