Cartograms of US elections by SFI External Professor Mark Newman and former SFI postdoc Michael Gastner offer a more nuanced view of the preferences of the US electorate than traditional red state vs. blue state maps.
2012 results are in! See a selection of cartograms from the 2012 US presidential election here.
Typical red vs. blue election maps that depict each state's winning candidate or party, although useful for visualizing likely electoral college outcomes, fail to take into account the voting public's population distribution.
Cartograms by Newman and Gastner have rescaled past election maps according to state or county populations, even the degree of preference voters indicate in polls.
Read the article in Science News (November 7, 2012)
Read the article in The Daily Beast (November 13, 2012)
Read the article in MIT Technology Review (November 14, 2012)