About
Academics
Multisport
Photography
Writing
Home

 

Monday, November 29, 2004

The Color and Shape of the American Electorate

The 2004 election was close, contentious and riddled with questions, yet those facts get quickly swept away once the winner-take-all process is declared over by the major media.

If you look at an election map and feel like America has drowned in a sea of red, it's time to reconceptualize the way America has been identified. Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman at the University of Michigan have created a series of maps to more accurately examine the America electorate -- beyond red and blue states -- taking population and percentage of votes by county into account.

2004 Vote by County
Shades of purple are used to represent the percentage of voters split among the two major candidates

2004 Vote by County
This 'cartogram' scales the counties according to population to give a truer representation of influence that is skewed on maps based solely on land size

To see more maps and comparisons, visit Gastner, Shalizi, and Newman's site...

***

And here's a flashback to the 2000 election results:

Due to the narrow margin of the original vote count, Florida law mandated a statewide recount. In addition, the Gore campaign requested that the votes in 3 counties be recounted by hand, which is within their rights under Florida election law. The Bush campaign then sued in Federal court to stop the hand recounts. This case eventually reached the United States Supreme Court, which ruled 5-4 to stop the vote count, effectively declaring Bush the winner. The Supreme Court also found that the additional recounts requested by Gore to be unconstitutional, in a 7-2 vote.

The Florida Ballot Project at the University of Chicago, sponsored by a consortium of major U.S. News organizations, conducted a comprehensive review all uncounted ballots in the Florida 2000 presidential election, and reported how different layouts correlate with voter mistakes. Its findings were reported by the media during the week after November 12, 2001. Recounts showed mixed results. Gore would have won any state-wide recount in which all of the ballots were counted. However, Bush would have won a recount if just smaller subsets of ballots were counted. Here is a summary of the NORC recount results performed using different counting standards, as seen in a report by one of the Washington Post journalists who ran the consortium recount.

Candidate Outcomes Based on Potential Recounts in Florida Presidential Election 2000

Review of All Ballots Statewide (Never Undertaken)

• Standard as set by each county Canvassing Board during their survey: Gore by 171
• Fully punched chads and limited marks on optical ballots: Gore by 115
• Any dimples or optical mark: Gore by 107
• One corner of chad detached or optical mark: Gore by 60

Review of Limited Sets of Ballots (Initiated But Never Completed)

• Gore request for recounts of all ballots in Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Volusia counties: Bush by 225
• Florida Supreme Court of all undervotes statewide: Bush by 430
• Florida Supreme Court as being implemented by the counties, some of whom refused and some counted overvotes as well as undervotes: Bush by 493

Certified Result (Official Final Count)

• Recounts included from Volusia and Broward only: Bush by 537

Source: Wikipedia's entry on the 2000 election

See also: Wikipedia's entry on the 2004 election