Electoral Vote maps give more visual power to states with large areas but few electoral votes







This map shows the electoral outcome of the 2016 US Presidential Election and is color coded red if the state was won by Donald Trump (R) and blue if the state was won by Hilary Clinton. When looking at the map, red states tend to be larger in area than blue states, but also generally have lower populations. This gives a misleading impression that the electoral share is “redder” than it actually is. For 2016, we can see that Trump won 306 electoral votes or (57% of the total electoral votes), but the map is shaded such that 73% of the area of the US is colored red. Similarly, Clinton won 232 electoral votes, but the map is shaded such that only 27% of the map is colored blue.

The map shrinks the states with low electoral votes relative to its area and increases the size of states with large numbers of electoral votes relative to its area. On average blue states grow as they are under-represented visually, while red states tend to shrink quite a bit because they are over-represented visually. Alaska is the state that shrinks the most and DC and New Jersey are the areas that grow the most in the new map.

Here’s another map I made that looks at the 2016 Presidential Election by County and shows the size of each county by land area or population.

I think this gives a more accurate picture of how the states voted because it also gives a sense of the relative weight of those states votes. Even with the change in sizes, the map is still mostly red, but gives a better sense of how close the electoral vote totals are.

Data and Tools:

Data on electoral votes is from Wikipedia. The map was made using the leaflet open source mapping library. Data was compiled and calculations on resizing states were made using javascript.