Part three from our popular sequel "How to Lie with Maps" (part 1, part 2).

There are lots of posts with last election result maps in the Blogostan, but I like this one the best: Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman of University of Michigan, "Maps and cartograms of the 2004 US presidential election results". It has, I think, all other kinds of maps I have seen and some I haven't. I named this post "how to tell truth", because all these maps in a sense tell truth, these are just different truths.

The main conclusion from these pictures: the division is mainly and roughly between urban and rural America. Big cities and megapolises voted for Kerry, the rest of the country for Bush.

As the authors said, the software "to produce cartograms is freely available here" (zip). I didn't play with it yet, but it can be interesting...

(Via Mathemagenic)