![]() ![]() The visuals we then see out of this count are maps where each state is solidly blue or solidly red, painting over the reality that there are plenty of voters of both and other persuasions throughout all states. When electing the president, we do this weird thing where we don’t count up all the people’s votes we count each state’s electoral votes. It seems that the state winner-take-all electoral college process for choosing the US president has infected the way we think about voters within a state, too. You might also think there are no conservatives in urban areas and almost no progressives in the rural region east of the Cascades. If you didn’t understand how voting works, you would think the maps above show that Trump won handily in the Pacific Northwest. And they make counties look like monoliths in a way that is unhelpful to Americans interested in bridging current political divides. Similarly, one state south, 56.45 percent of Oregon voters chose Joe Biden in 2020 compared to just 40.37 percent for Donald Trump.īut maps that color entire counties red or blue can dupe viewers: they make both states look majority red. The numbers are clear: in 2020, 57.97 percent of Washington voters chose Joe Biden, and only 38.77 percent chose Donald Trump. And in an election? It’s the people that should matter. But they can also distort viewers’ understanding of election outcomes, because first and foremost, they show acres, not the number of people living on those acres. Maps can be powerful and important visuals for helping people quickly understand complex geography-based information-hence their prevalence in election-night newscasts. Loren Culp, who ran for governor against incumbent Jay Inslee in Washington in 2020, used the same logic when he showed maps of counties in Washington as proof that the election results were wrong. Someone recently, earnestly, told me that Oregon and Washington legislative lines must be gerrymandered “because Democrats win more elections, but both states are actually red.” When I asked what they meant by that, they said, “Just look at the maps!” Maps can and should do better, counting people over acres and showing the political diversity that exists throughout the country.In a democracy, it’s the people that should matter, not the land mass.The political diversity that exists across urban, suburban, and rural places.The number of voters rather than acres in a given place and. ![]() Many election-night maps color entire states or counties red or blue, failing to represent (or intentionally encouraging false understandings about):.Map readers could click on the state to see which counties were still processing ballots, and the rest of the page provided even more detail. The percentage of votes counted is indicated in text, as well as in a legend available when users hover over the map. Some states appear textured, or hatched, because it wasn’t possible to say who had won yet. The New York Times used multiple approaches to characterize uncertainties in election results. For instance, Fox News changed the brightness of its map’s reds and blues to illustrate the estimated number of votes counted, with darker colours representing areas that had reported more of their ballots. We knew that many states would take days to fully report their results.Ĭartographers use a variety of “ visual variables,” such as texture and brightness, in order to represent this kind of information. The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in unprecedented mail-in voting and delays in ballot counting. With all this in mind, we should ask ourselves two questions when we look at any U.S. Web maps can automatically reload with fresh data, but such updates may be misunderstood if care isn’t taken to contextualize them. “Affordances” such as legends that appear when users hover over parts of the map also help put more information on the map and into readers’ hands. ![]() Some interactive maps also let users drill deeper to get “ details on demand” - to see county level rather than just national level results. For instance, web maps might allow “ re-symbolization” to show the data in a different way. Unlike print maps, web maps often allow their users to customize design. ![]()
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