That opens one hell of a can of worms though. Sure weighting by EC sounds reasonable, but frankly you'd really want to have it such that it looks mostly blue when the blue party wins and mostly red when the red party wins, which is nigh impossible because that's an incredibly nonlinear process.
Much better to optimize to make it look mostly red/blue when the red/blue party wins the popular vote, as that's actually a linear process.
mostly blue when the blue party wins and mostly red when the red party wins, which is nigh impossible because that's an incredibly nonlinear process
The 2016 neutralizing map (right below the purple map) does this. I think it more closely matches people's perceptions about how their community aligns politically, too.
Literally white-washing (well, hue-desaturating) less populous areas out communicates something different. If you want to communicate impact on election outcome, then you just need to weight the vote per person based on people per elector instead of totaling the voting population in each area.
Technically white-wash is a more accurate term for it than desaturating, though personally I just view it as decreasing opacity against a white background.
Is people per elector the right measure for voting power though? There is an argument to be made (successfully in some cases [1]) that voting power is inversely proportional to the square root of the population. And of course the house seats are distributed in a different which minimizes the relative differences in voters per house seat between states [2].
Point being, voting power is a tricky thing to determine.
Comments
That opens one hell of a can of worms though. Sure weighting by EC sounds reasonable, but frankly you'd really want to have it such that it looks mostly blue when the blue party wins and mostly red when the red party wins, which is nigh impossible because that's an incredibly nonlinear process.
Much better to optimize to make it look mostly red/blue when the red/blue party wins the popular vote, as that's actually a linear process.
The 2016 neutralizing map (right below the purple map) does this. I think it more closely matches people's perceptions about how their community aligns politically, too.
Literally white-washing (well, hue-desaturating) less populous areas out communicates something different. If you want to communicate impact on election outcome, then you just need to weight the vote per person based on people per elector instead of totaling the voting population in each area.
Technically white-wash is a more accurate term for it than desaturating, though personally I just view it as decreasing opacity against a white background.
Is people per elector the right measure for voting power though? There is an argument to be made (successfully in some cases [1]) that voting power is inversely proportional to the square root of the population. And of course the house seats are distributed in a different which minimizes the relative differences in voters per house seat between states [2].
Point being, voting power is a tricky thing to determine.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_method
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington%E2%80%93Hill_method