Having seen one US post-election map too many, I finally realized what I so very much disliked about them — the color-coded maps showing all that red give a distorted view of the electorate.
Area is not the interesting factor, population density is. It’s true that the US map looks fairly red, leading to the conclusion that an overwhelming majority of the US citizens voted Bush.
This isn’t so.
It’s just sparsely populated states.
Michael Gastner has been doing research in distoring maps according to different factors; his homepage currently prominently features a map of the US that evens out the population. And then, suddenly, it’s a lot more even.
Thank you, Erich for discussing this with me and of course for pointing out Michael Gastner to me.
