Ibehave tooele7/25/2023 ![]() ![]() Communicating the margin by intensity of color is not accurate readers have little chance of approximating the numbers. But it fails to convey the important fact that neither candidate in Nevada 2016 won a majority, and it tells us nothing about third party candidates. At least we get the idea of who the winner of the state is, which is more than you can say for the filled area. The obvious problem with File:United States presidential election in Nevada, 2016.svg is that it's awash in blue, implying that blue won the state by a landslide. Given the inherent confusion, where should never introduce more red herrings like, "number of counties won". It's very misleading to introduce prizes into elections that don't exist, especially hen the American electoral college system is confusing enough. It strongly implies that counties are "won", by coloring the whole county for the candidate, when in fact states are won. You have no idea if they had a plurality or a majority in the county. At least you can say the data is all there: number of votes is shown by size and their lead is there. So a tree map like File:United States presidential election in Nevada, 2016.svg is a big improvement, but it's still misleading. The only reason to keep these is inertia. WTF? It only shows the size of the lead of a candidate by acre of land, which is a statistic that means nothing at all. Elections are, if nothing else, about how many votes were counted, yet here is this ubiquitous graph that leaves out how many votes were counted. This map doesn't even give you any idea who even won, let alone by how much, because it contains no information whatsoever about how many votes were cast. The overwhelming impression is that this is a landslide for Trump in red, because it dominates the view. The most misleading graphs are filled areas of geography, such as File:Nevada Presidential Election Results 2016.svg. Pies often mislead readers, but when there are only two, or maybe three, colors, it's not a large error. The wasted space of pies gets turned into a feature when you're using that wasted space to display geography, as when you put pies on maps. They also use the entire rectangle of page space you allocate, rather than wasting space, like pies, or bar charts. I'm normally a big fan of tree maps because empirical data says they give readers the least error-prone estimate of the actual data. I prefer pies on maps over either, but between these two tree maps, the one we're using is misleading. ![]() We should prefer a tree map of election outcomes that includes both major candidates, and groups in the third parties, by breaking down the counties by color (fourth image on the right) rather than use color tone to convey the county's winner's proportion (second image). ![]()
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