U.S. election maps are wildly misleading, so this designer fixed themThe most viral election map of
U.S. election maps are wildly misleading, so this designer fixed themThe most viral election map of 2020 was actually made by a Belgian man in 2019It started with a tweet from Lara Trump. On September 28, 2019, the House of Representatives was preparing for impeachment hearings against Donald Trump. And she posted the electoral map from 2016—a familiar sea of red that implies America itself is Republican. Over the top of it, the caption read, “Try to impeach this.”The Belgian designer Karim Douïeb—who runs his own data visualization company, called Jetpack—came across the post. It bugged him because, like so many electoral maps, it framed thousands of miles of empty land as voting for Trump instead of representing the few people actually living in it.“I told myself, this is completely wrong in terms of data visualization,” Douïeb recalls. “I’m not so into politics or anything, but I had to correct this visual mistake.”So after work one night, after putting the kids to bed, he spent two hours on a retort.“Challenge accepted,” he wrote on October 8, 2019, as he posted the perfect correction: A GIF that started as Laura Trump’s 2016 electoral map but then transitioned to a more accurate representation, which depicted the actual count of red and blue votes in counties across the nation as simple circles, their size proportional to the number of votes. And finally, Americans had a portrait of our country’s voting habits that was accurate: Not the normal sea of red, but a polka-dotted country, where blue voters are ever so much more prominent than red ones.Source: Fast Company -- source link
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