Tuesday’s print edition of The New York Times has the most detailed election map we’ve ever produced: ZIP-code level results for the 2012 presidential race spread across four pages, using data from Catalist.

The map is part of a special election section that aims to help explain the political geography of the United States — identifying where people who are conservative and liberal live and pointing out how physical boundaries, like the Rio Grande and the Cascade Mountains, often align with political ones.

This level of detail reveals patterns otherwise masked in a state or county-level map, like the presence of small, Democratic urban areas in even the reddest states, and the stripes of red, yellow and blue along Long Island in New York. When I look at my hometown of Rockford in northern Illinois, the map reveals the delineation created by the Rock River, with the majority-minority ZIP codes west of the river voting more Democratic, and the majority-white ones on the east side voting more Republican.

Just like the county-level map below, the bulk of the map is covered in red. Less-populated areas that cover the center of the country tend to vote Republican, while smaller, densely populated places along the coasts and in large cities lean Democratic. This provokes a common complaint about shaded-area “choropleth” maps like this: They are misleading because they seem to suggest that the vast majority of America votes Republican.

The observation is not wrong — a shaded-area map of the United States does not accurately represent population. But the goal of the printed map is not to reveal who won the 2012 election — a simple bar chart would do that much better. The goal is to reveal intricately detailed geographic patterns, like the political striping of Long Island. At the same time, it is extremely accessible (it takes very little effort to locate your hometown).

This isn’t the only way we represent results on election night. There is no perfect form for showing results in a nuanced way that is at once fair, accessible and revealing. Different types of maps, and charts for that matter, are better at each of these things than others.

Since at least 1896, The New York Times has published what is now the most iconic type of election map — a shaded choropleth. If you know your geography, you can quickly identify who won which state. They are also really good at revealing regional patterns, like how the South voted together in 1896.

But like the ZIP-code map in Tuesday’s print edition, this kind of map isn’t ideal for showing who won the election. Elections in the United States are ultimately won with electoral votes, allocated to the states based on their population. As time went on, The Times labeled the states with the number of votes they got, but in most cases it would take readers entirely too long to add them up and determine a winner.

By at least 1992, The Times's Graphics Department started running charts alongside these maps, to give readers a quick and accurate measure of the result.

To address the incongruity between the size of the states and their electoral heft, The Times will frequently publish another type of map, called a cartogram, like this one from 2004.

In these maps, each state is sized in proportion to its electoral votes. The ratio of blue to red matches the ratio of Democrat to Republican in the country. But even as these maps help solve one problem, they create others. Results aren’t always the easiest to read in cartograms. Even though I know where South Dakota is on a traditional map, it takes me a little longer to find it here, because there is significant geographic distortion. And when a race is close, it is still hard to determine who is ahead unless you meticulously count boxes.

Using a cartogram is by no means a new idea. The earliest ones I could find in The Times were these Senate and House representation maps from 1929.

There are several other approaches that The Times’s Graphics desk has tried over the years.

Using colored circles to represent the lead in the number of votes is a common one. The map below from 2012 maintains its shape, and areas with larger vote margins are emphasized. The downside to this map is that circles often overlap, and it’s hard to tell who won a state’s electoral votes. Only by looking at the shaded state map can we tell that the blue circles in South Florida are big enough to outweigh the smaller red circles across the rest of the state.

This map from 2004 seeks to solve the population problem by removing uninhabited areas. But if you are looking for the result in a sparsely populated place, it can be hard to decipher. And it is still difficult to tell who won each state.

This map, showing the shift in vote margin by county from 2008 to 2012, prioritizes the representation of population by setting the frequency of arrow movements to match the number of voters in the county.

These maps, showing precinct results for the 2014 Senate elections, also adjust for population by darkening denser areas.

There is no perfect election map. In fact, many times geographic data isn’t best represented as a map at all. On election night, The Times’s “Big Board” provides a table of results that is great at identifying trends like how tossup states are voting or if there is an upset in a state that was expected to go another way. States are sorted alphabetically within their groups for accessibility. The Big Board was first developed in 2006 to track the midterm results internally, and it was published for readers in 2008.

In this results table from 1852, states are sorted beginning with Maine in the Northeast to California in the West, perhaps aimed at an audience with a keen sense of geography.

But there’s still a downside. One drawback of tables composed solely of text is that the context isn’t immediately apparent because numbers on a page look pretty similar to our eye. One solution is to add some visual elements like shading or color, or to make a chart instead of a map or table.

An early attempt at a table with coded shading was printed over four pages of The Times in February 1889. Each county is represented by a circle, with the top half representing the winner of the previous election in 1884 and the bottom representing the winner in 1888. Victories by Republicans are shaded in black, with Democratic ones left white. The counties are organized by state, which are in turn placed roughly in their geographic position.

More than 100 years later, this chart from the 2000 election illustrated the states on two dimensions — the width of the bars shows the margin of victory for Mr. Bush on the left and for Mr. Gore on the right, and the height of the bars represents electoral votes. The chart reveals how Democratic or Republican each state voted, while also illustrating the power of populated states and giving an accurate picture of the closeness of the race at that time, before three states had been called.

Another chart, this one published as a preview to the 2012 election, represents the states on three dimensions: circles sized by electoral votes, placed on the y axis by margin of victory in 2008 and on the x axis based on the share of people with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

The chart is complicated and requires some time to digest, but the payoff reveals some interesting insights — that President Obama could have won re-election without Ohio or other states with less educated voters that he won in 2008, as long as he won states like Virginia and Colorado, with their more educated voters.