Remapping the Election

In a current Vox Video and article, Vox details the negative impact of the traditional visual aids used during November’s presidential election. In particular, the article argues that the presidential map used during the November election is visually deceptive, because small states like Massachusetts have many more votes than geographically large states like Montana, which have just a small electoral importance. While Americans may be familiar with the visual outline of the USA tinted in red and blue, the map itself says nothing about the electoral importance of each state. Instead, Vox author Liz Scheltens maintains that in visualising data, there needs to be a priority of the information that is important, specifically: geographic accuracy vis-à-vis electoral importance. This current map denotes the intersection of rigorous and quantitative analysis.

The Vox article applauds an alternative map produced by the New York Times that represents each state as a square that is proportional to the number of electoral votes of that state. Moreover, the geographic arrangement of the squares makes the map visually appealing an easy to read. The benefit gained through this revamped visualisation is the demonstration of the value of data journalism as practical. In particular, the square presidential map illustrates the same information as the traditional map, but organises the relationships in the data (between state population, size and number of electoral votes) so that the viewer does not have to think twice about where more/less votes are coming from. Vox’s own video visually portrays how the New York Times uses numbers artistically, combining the quantitative and empirical approach of Silver’s “Approaches to Journalism.” The impact of rearranging shapes and sizes probably places the proposed electoral map to the north-west corner of the diagram.  

The impact of a potentially new presidential map is tremendous. It may help voters to become more informed, journalists report more comprehensively during election night, and, perhaps most importantly, increase the efficiency of data analysis. The Vox article demonstrates in both its video and analysis of the New York Times creation that simple can be better.