If the image on the left, the majority-of-votes map in figure 2 and figure 1, is all that you’ve seen, you can be forgiven for succumbing to the common narrative. Namely, that it is the entirety of the south and west divided against the entirety of the north and east, with Nuwara Eliya as a solitary peak surrounded by opponents.

The majority-of-votes map, like most things in popular media, ignores the nuances in life. For one thing, it ignores the fact that an entire district cannot possibly be inhabited by a constituents of a single party. If that’s all it did, it wouldn’t be so bad. In it’s quest for descriptive brevity, the image on the left pushes an ultimately disastrous narrative , a narrative that Sri Lanka spent 30 years trying to put behind us, that we are harshly and unequivocally divided. If you judge Sri Lanka by this visualization, you’d be left with the sense that when you cross a border from red to green, you are about to be in a completely different place inhabited by fundamentally different human beings.

The image on the right, difference-in-votes map, does a far better job of visualizing the actual outcome of the election. Most importantly , and perhaps thankfully, it shows us that there are a lot of “in-the-middle” left in Sri Lanka. It shows that there is some gradient along which the votes were caste and that even though there are very strong concentrations, there is no absolute divide.

How Big Was The Lead?

The majority-of-votes map , in ignoring the fact that no district was 100% for one party, provides no insight into how well one candidate did relative to the other. It aims to answer the question “who won each district?” and it does that very well. While it can be argued that the majority-of-votes map answers the question that it’s supposed to, we may be sacrificing some very important nuances worthy of representation when that image is the only one that gets coverage. There are many instances where reducing the number of dimensions shown in an image is advantageous but this may not be one them.

Once we allow for representation of variation in the votes in a district, the next useful question to ask is : How big was each candidate’s lead? . The image on the right in figure 3 below answers this question. Taking the differences in the number of votes between each candidate as a percentage of the total number of votes cast, we can adjust for the population of each district (some districts are far more populated than others). In the map on the right in figure 3, the darker the color, the bigger the lead.