It never quite makes sense, watching the election play out. You see huge areas of red on a map–whole states and counties–while commentators quickly explain that populations aren’t accurately represented. It’s good information, but when we’re discussing real voting patterns, why are we looking at such maps in the first place?
John Nelson from IDV Solutions created a different map of 2012’s presidential election results with data pulled from Politico. Rather than color in whole blocs of the map based on the party of its voting majority, every 100 votes is represented by a dot, randomly dispersed within the county they were cast. So instead of red and blue blocs, we see something much closer to real people voting, and where.
