Show that Mitt Romney map. Look at that map. Let's go back to the 2000 map.
And it is in dire need of a redesign. Just look
at this map. It's not just unhelpful,
it's actually misleading. It shows the states
that Mitt Romney and Barack Obama won in
2012.  Without more information it's
really hard to tell that Obama actually
won. He beat Romney by more than a
hundred electoral votes. So, while this map
does a great job telling you that Romney
won Montana, for example, it doesn't
tell you is how much that victory
doesn't matter. That's because montana only gets
three electoral votes.
Massachusetts gets four times as many, and you can barely find it on the map.
That's because the people who made this
map made a choice. They chose to
prioritize geographic accuracy over
electoral importance. And geographically
accurate maps are great for road trips,
but they don't do a very good job
telling account the country voted. So,
some designers have tried other solutions.
They're making different maps called cartograms. These maps distort the
state's shape so that their physical
size corresponds not with their
geographic boundaries, but with the
number of electoral votes they get.
Here's a version designed by the New
York Times, with each state scaled by
electoral votes. They've ditched the
precise borders of each state in favor
of squares, but still arranged them
geographically, so it's easy enough to
find your own state. Another approach
from the Daily Kos makes room to
report the popular vote from each
congressional district. But so far these
ideas haven't been widely adopted. So
does this mean that we're stuck with bad
maps for another election cycle? Not
necessarily. There are so many different
ways to visualize information. Why not show a list of states?
Or a series of bar charts? All of these methods tell you so much more
than those ubiquitous red state, blue state maps.
