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An electoral map that better represents American voters

Online Niel November 3, 2024

Every election cycle, we are faced with a familiar image: the electoral map, with Republican-majority states shown in bright red, Democratic states in blue, and states that have yet to be called. in grey.

On election night, every gray the state decisively reverts to a fully saturated red or blue, turning the country into an uneven checkerboard. In this stark picture, the country is divided into “red states” and “blue states.”

The media’s use of this binary color format, while easy to interpret, falsely indicates that entire states are either deeply Republican or Democratic. On Election Day, the swing states we watch with bated breath are described the same way as those with landslide victories — they are either red or blue, even when victory for one party came down to a narrow margin. This oversimplification may seem benign, but it is not, misleading the public and disengaging voters.

Research has shown that binary electoral maps don’t just reflect political division, they fuel a false one impression that we are more divided than we actually are. Study participants presented with a red/blue map perceived the country as more politically divided and felt their vote had less impact than those who were presented with a map that shaded states in various shades of purple to convey the margins of vote.

Purple maps they present their own challenges: They make it difficult to quickly discern who won in a particular state on election night—a crucial piece of information. However, while clarity about the winner is important, it shouldn’t come at the expense of nuance. My colleagues and I at Harvard Medical School, the University of Virginia, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison tested a simple solution: a red/blue gradient map. States with narrow voting margins (for example, with the winning candidate receiving 51% of the vote) would appear in the lightest shades, the colors becoming brighter as the margin increases, and states with landslide victories (about two-thirds of the vote) would be shown in fully saturated colors. This approach allows viewers to quickly identify the winner while also appreciating the diversity of voter support in each state.

I found this study participants who viewed this map instead of a binary red/blue map for the 2020 presidential election were more accurate in their estimates of vote margins and more confident that their votes counted.

Of course, there are plenty of ways to better represent election results, including ones that don’t give the false impression that there are more voters in sparsely populated states than there actually are. (After all, the earth does not vote. People do.)

In his words Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, “The media is the message.” The shift to a more nuanced electoral map may seem like a trivial change, but it’s actually a powerful one. It sends a message that America is a nation of diverse voters and each one of us matters.

Rémy Furrer is a behavioral scientist and bioethicist working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.