A Graphic Worth a 1000 Lies

They did it in 2000. Remember that oh so ubiquitous map showing the county by county "victory" of George W. Bush over Al Gore? Never mind that it was people, not the geographical masses that voted. That map showed the results for a mythical land where dirt votes. Even though Gore won the popular vote in 2000 this map was extolled as "proof" of Bush's mandate. No matter how counter-intuitive it seemed, I know many people who bought into it.

Well, leave it to the right wing to take an intellectually bereft yet politically successful tool and trot it out once more. Yes, they're at it again. Sean Hannity has been touting this map for all would we be duped by it. Now, while the graphic paints a compelling picture it does have one glaring fault: it is a lie.

The problem with that graphic is two-fold. One, as mentioned above, it is a grave analytical flaw to compare land areas (e.g. counties) when one is supposedly measuring human behavior (e.g. voting results). This is what those in the scientific community call "comparing apples to oranges". In layman's terms I'd call it "bullshit". The other problem is the misleading nature of the rounding effect. While I don't dispute that a majority of voter's voted for Bush in those red counties, being a binary display the graphic implies the entire county voted that way. That's like the winner-take-all problem with electoral votes in most of the states. The reality is that most of the nation's counties voted in nearly equal proportions for both Bush and for Kerry.

This is a far better representation. An honest evaluation of the votes by county must weigh both sides of the issue, not just those that won the, often very slight, majority. Ironically, I think the two maps also show the difference between the world views of black-and-white conservatives (map #1) and more nuanced liberals (map #2).

However, even the second map above is still displaying landmass to indicate voters. If you feel compelled to view voter behavior within the context of a map of the US, this is really the best sort of representation. Here we finally see some indication of actual voters (i.e. people not just dirt) in the "hills". I find it interesting to note that while there are only a few purely blue peaks, I could find no red hills at all. As a matter of fact, the only areas where we see solid Bush-red is in the lowest "valleys" indicating the sparsest population areas of the entire nation. In other words, the less likely you are to run into another human being the more likely you are to have voted for W.

This begs the question: is there a connection between anti-social behavior and Republicans?