Previously: An Online Atlas of Canadian Election Results; A Cartogram of Canada’s Election Results; More Canadian Election Maps; Mapping the Canadian Election Results: Technical Details.

The hot takes about the New York Times’s detailed map of the 2016 U.S. presidential election results (see previous entry) have been coming in fast. Most of the critiques focus on the map’s failure to address population density: a sparsely populated but huge precinct appears to have more significance than a tiny district crowded by people. See, for example, Andrew Middleton’s post on Medium, Keir Clarke’s post on Maps Mania or this post on Wonkette—or, for that matter, a good chunk of cartographic Twitter for the past few days. (It’s not just Ken, is what I’m saying.)

The responses to those critiques generally do two things. They point out that the map had a specific purpose—as the Times’s Josh Katz says, “we wanted to use the 2016 results to make a tool that depicted the contours of American political geography in fine detail, letting people explore the places they care about block by block.” As he argues in the full Twitter thread, showing population density was not the point: other maps already do that. Others explore the “empty land doesn’t vote” argument: Tom MacWright thinks that’s “mostly a bogus armchair critique.” Bill Morris critiques the “acres don’t vote” thesis in more detail.

Relatedly, Wired had a piece last Thursday on the different ways to map the U.S. election results, in which Ken Field’s gallery of maps plays a leading role.

Previously: The New York Times’s Very Detailed Map of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.

It’s 2018. The 2016 U.S. presidential election is nearly two years in the past. But that didn’t stop the New York Times from unleashing a new map of the 2016 election results earlier this week. On the surface it’s a basic choropleth map: nothing new on that front. But this map drills down a bit further: showing the results by precinct, not just by county. The accompanying article sets out what the Times is trying to accomplish: “On the neighborhood level, many of us really do live in an electoral bubble, this map shows: More than one in five voters lived in a precinct where 80 percent of the two-party vote went to Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton. But the map also reveals surprising diversity.”

Kenneth Field has some objections to the map. “So you have smaller geographical areas. Detailed, yes. Accurate, certainly. Useful? Absolutely not because of the way the map was made.” It’s a choropleth map that doesn’t account for population: “An area that has 100 voters and 90 of them voted Republican is shown as dark red and a 90% share. Exactly the same symbol would be used for an area that has 100,000 voters, 90,000 of whom voted Republican.” It gets worse when that thinly populated precinct is geographically larger. (Not only that: the map uses Web Mercator—it is built with Mapbox—so Alaska is severely exaggerated at small scales.) There are, Ken says, other maps that account for population density (not least of which his own dot density map).

The Times map has a very specific purpose, and Ken is going after it for reasons that aren’t really relevant to that purpose. The map is aimed at people looking at their own and surrounding neighbourhoods: the differences in area and population between a precinct in Wyoming and a precinct in Manhattan wouldn’t normally come up. It works at large scales, whereas Ken’s point is more about small scales: zoom out and the map becomes misleading, or at the very least just as problematic as (or no more special than) any other, less granular choropleth map that doesn’t account for population. The map isn’t meant to be small-scale, doesn’t work at small scales, but then people regularly use maps for reasons not intended by the mapmaker. The mistake, I suspect, is making a map that does not work at every scale available at every scale.

Update: See this post for more reactions to the map.

Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party has won an overwhelming majority in Sunday’s Hungarian parliamentary elections. Maps Mania found interactive maps of the results, however monochromatic, from the newspaper Magyar Nemzet. In Hungarian, so good luck.

This is a huge resource, all the more impressive given the scope of the data and the fact that it seems to have been done by just one person: J. P. Kirby, a self-described “regular guy interested in politics and elections. I’m also a map geek.” (Naturally.) What I like best is that the atlas shows the historical electoral district boundaries for each election, which is fascinating on its own but must have taken some digging on Kirby’s part. (Also kind of weird to see early 20th-century results overlaid on a modern, OSM-based map with airports and freeways and so on.)

Previously: 1895 Electoral Atlas of Canada.

The New York Times’s graphics department generally does very good election maps, and their work on yesterday’s gubernatorial election in Virginia is no exception. I particularly like how the interactive map toggles from a standard choropleth map to maps that better account for population density, show the size of each candidate’s lead and the shift in vote since the 2016 presidential election.

Detailed maps of the results of last weekend’s parliamentary elections in the Czech Republic, which saw the apparent rise to power of populist billionaire Andrej Babiš, are available at iRozhlas. The page is in Czech, of course, but the detail is there for those who need it. [Maps Mania]

Cartogrammer extraordinaire Benjamin Hennig has produced cartograms of the 2017 German federal election results. A second set of cartograms looks at voter turnout and each party’s share of the vote. These cartograms distort for population to compensate for densely populated areas, so that the choropleth maps used for election results are proportionate.

The German data visualization studio webkid worked on a number of election maps; they have a roundup of election maps and infographics they worked on as well as from other media organizations.

A quick tour around European news sources this morning turned up few, or small, maps of the results of yesterday’s federal election in Germany. (At least so far: it’s only been a day, and I wasn’t very thorough.) I’ve mostly seen graphs and other infographics being used to show the results: see ZDF’s gallery. But yesterday Maps Mania found the Berliner Morgenpost’s live map of the results, which presumably was being updated in real time yesterday. German elections are a little complicated, so the map has a number of tabs showing various aspects of the results: first (constituency) and second (party) votes, who came second or third, where various parties got the bulk of their support and so forth.