Nytimes election map 20201/3/2024 ![]() ![]() ![]() Trump wasn’t elected in 2016 because he won more ballots than Hillary Clinton, but because he earned more electoral college votes.Įach state has two electoral college votes, plus more based on its share of the total population. Less misleading approaches showed county-level results using circles coloured by the vote winner and sized according to the number of voters or margin of victory.īut a presidential election map depicting county-level results gives the wrong impression anyway, since this is not how U.S. In the 2020 election, the conservative Fox News was the only outlet I reviewed that allowed its readers to see results in this way. Fox News view of 2020 election results by county as of the morning of Nov. It’s a good indicator that his support in 2016 was widespread in a geographic sense, but it does not actually show that he was popular, because the map does not account for how few people voted in these counties. It shows 2016’s results by shading counties according to the party that won them, illustrating that the vast majority voted for Trump. The most infamous example is this map of the 2016 election that Trump supporters brought to his defence during his impeachment, and which the president reportedly framed for the Oval Office: The most common American election maps overstate results from rural areas because these consist of large but relatively unpopulated counties and states. (The New York Times) But what does the map actually show? It uses texture - hatches - to illustrate where the vote is still undetermined. 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. Professional mapmakers - cartographers - know these tools are both promising and limited. Since so many of us consume the news online, it was interactive maps embedded in websites that offered the most important windows onto the vote. So what did this year’s election maps rightly or wrongly tell us? Mapping on the web While maps have long been used for political propaganda, even maps from sources without a partisan bent “lie.” They are, at best, partial representations of reality - statistical and design choices about what to illustrate and how. news outlets such as the CBC, Maclean’s, The Globe and Mail, Fox News and the New York Times. I tracked 10 election maps from Canadian and U.S. presidential election, people were glued to screens big and small for the latest results to be flashed on electoral maps. Read the original article.Īs the world awaited a winner in the U.S. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. ![]()
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