Redistricting Mini Golf

To show the absurdity of congressional district shapes, Dylan Moriarty and the Washington Post have designed this wonderful miniature golf game you can play online. 

Above is the Ohio 1st District. Republicans split Cincinnati into three districts to dilute that city's voting power. While not nearly the trickiest hole to play you have to squeeze the ball through the narrow gaps of Cincy.

The game begins in Wyoming, a state with only one district, therefore not one that can be manipulated. You can see from the layout that each district, or hole has an info box describing its demographics and voting patterns. 

The Illinois 4th District is famous for its "earmuff" shape, packing the Hispanic vote into the Midwest's only Hispanic-majority seat.

Indiana 7 is a trick hole. While the district looks very regular in shape, it is still designed in a highly political way by packing all of Indianapolis into it.

The toughest to play, by far is Maryland's terrible third. The water traps are completely unforgiving. 

You can see how I struggled with it by looking at my score sheet. Even with a generous par of 26, I was up to about my 50th stroke when I got caught in an impossible water situation and had to bail out.

Here is my final score sheet. I accidentally skipped the bonus hole-the original Gerry-mander in Massachusetts. This was my second go around so my scores on the other holes were pretty good. You have to play it at least once to get the hang of it. Have fun!

Routes to the Riot

A year ago "patriots" traveled across the country to stage a terrorist attack on the US Capitol to stop a democratically elected President from taking power, because that's what patriots do. Here are some maps of the routes taken. These are from the Colorado Times Recorder, a news organization that I know very little about so this is not meant as an endorsement of them.

The routes are the "cowboy route" for people from the west, the "rebel route" for southerners and the "minuteman route" for the northeast. Once there they had this map, featuring white supremacist hero Pepe the Frog, to orient them and keep them away from the "unsafe" zones, ie. places where non-white people live.

  

Looking forward to a new year where half the members of Congress continue to pretend that none of this ever happened.

Some Good Election Maps

I really dislike most U.S. election maps. The binary red-blue scheme that dominates most maps is very misleading (see last post) and obscures more interesting patterns. 

I particularly like this map from the Washington Post showing how the political "winds" are shifting.

The red "gusts" to the right show greater Republican support from four years ago while the blue leftward lines show greater support for Democrats. Purple vertical lines are places that saw little change. The legend is complicated but the patterns are pretty clear.

The leftward drift in the Great Plains and diverging areas of the south central states are patterns you won't see on a typical red/blue map. By contrast here is the same map showing the 2016 changes (from 2012). 

This is a nice "scrollytelling" article. When you scroll down enough you can see the two maps animated.

The New York Times, in addition to the usual red-blue offerings has this size of lead map.

One of the best things about this approach is the subtlety of the colors. The clever choice of size of lead makes it so the viewer has a better sense of the population and how certain states were won or lost. Some of the biggest counties have smaller circles because the size of the lead was less than in other places. Largely empty counties are de-emphasized because land doesn't vote.

Election Reminder

As this election insanity wears on here is a previously posted reminder that land doesn't vote, people do. Yes, I have posted this before but it bears repeating.

You will probably see many very red looking maps over the next week or two. Karim Douïeb created this visualization (from the 2016 election) along with a set of visualizations you can step through here. They include a nice map to cartogram transition.

 

Gerrymandering the EU for Funds and Profit

There's a good article in The Pudding showing how countries like Hungary have been able to increase their share of European Union development funds by splitting the most economically developed regions. This creates "have not" regions within the "have" regions that are more likely to meet the threshold for aid.

In the map above the entire Budapest region is shaded in green (above average development) whereas the rest of the country is shaded pink for below average development. By making a tight ring around Budapest and calling the rest of the region "Pest", the country now has one more below average region that can receive aid, while Budapest has a more concentrated (greener) level of development.

This is a similar process to the gerrymandering so familiar in the United States. Lithuania and Poland have also done similar splits. The maps below illustrate nicely the difference between development at a larger scale (country wide) and at a regional scale.

You can really see how one or a few cities can change the balance, most notably in France. The article does this great "scrollytelling" bit that shifts between these two maps and then with further scrolling send each region flying over to its position on a graph.

To get the full effect and see much more go here and scroll away.

The Awakening

The Awakening, a cartoon by Henry Mayer about women's suffrage was published in 1915 in Puck Magazine. It shows liberty marching across the nation from the west to the east.

The western states (in white) had all granted women the vote, while the rest of the country was "in the dark" waiting for the march of freedom, which finally came in 1919 with the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. Although New Jersey briefly allowed women the right to vote shortly after the founding of the country, it was the west where the right to vote was first permanently established. Wyoming was the first state to pass a law explicitly giving women the right to vote in 1869. Utah, Idaho and Colorado followed and by 1915 there was a clear geographical pattern.

The map above shows the state of women's suffrage laws just before adoption of the Amendment. The color scheme is complicated but dark blue is full suffrage and then the colors go through various levels of partial suffrage until red, which is no suffrage. The legend can be seen by clicking the image above.

The 19th Amendment passed the House of Representatives in May, 1919 and the Senate the following month. By August, 1920 enough states had ratified it to add it to the Constitution, however some  southern states did not ratify it for decades afterwards. Mississippi was the last state to ratify it - in 1984.

The Geography of Partisan Prejudice

A recent article in The Atlantic features a set of maps showing where in the United States people show more or less prejudice towards people from other political parties.

The map is based on a survey with questions like how would you feel about a close family member marrying a Democrat or Republican. Darker areas are places where prejudicial feelings are higher. "In general, the most politically intolerant Americans, according to the analysis, tend to be whiter, more highly educated, older, more urban, and more partisan themselves." These people tend to be more politically isolated-less likely to talk to people who disagree with them and more likely to assume the other side is more extreme than they are.

Hover over a county to get percentile information.

What is really interesting is the state to state variability. Compare the Carolinas to each other-or the Dakotas. Some of this may be due to specific statewide factors such as a recent controversial statewide election. There are also maps for each political party's level of prejudice.

The chief takeaway seems to be that people living in certain areas, such as small towns, associate more with other who have different opinions and are better able to see their humanity, if not better understand their point of view. I work with lots of people who have very different opinions than me and sometimes we talk about politics but rarely because they're dumb, awful people who hate America - #justkidding.

The Quebec Election Cartogram

Quebec is a great use case for election cartograms. The map below (via CBC) shows how dominant the cities and suburbs are in population.

I like how they shaded the shape of the Province behind the hexagons. The geography be unrecognizable without it. The map at the bottom of their page illustrates how one Riding (district), Ungava covers over half of Quebec's area but contains a similar population to a tiny Riding in Montreal.

In the recent election the conservative Coalition avenir Quebec (CAQ) made huge gains at the expense of the Liberal and Québécois parties. Here are before and after maps. I rearranged the from the side by side view on CBC because the layout of this blog makes it easier to read this way.

Light blue is CAQ, dark blue Québécois red is Liberal and Orange is Québec Solidaire, another party that saw gains in this election. Above is before and below after the election.

Here is the side by side images as they appear on the CBC web page. The comparisons are easier to make when not distracted by the giant low density areas of northern Quebec.

Paris Election Map, 1869

Cartographers have been trying to figure out how to best show election maps for a long time. Here in the United States, the typical county map can badly represent vote totals when large counties with tiny populations dominate the map. In 1860's Paris, a cartographer named Louis Montigny used this interesting approach to map the city's neighborhoods.

A square centimeter represents 1000 votes, with the political parties color coded. This clearly shows who won each neighborhood but also gives a great picture of how well each party performed. Yellow represents the governing party of Napoleon III, while opposition parties are colored blue, pink and red. Socialists are orange. Viewing the entire city, there are some pretty clear patterns of strength and weaknesses of the different parties.

As you approach the city's edge, the larger, less populated neighborhoods get the appropriate level of visual prominence.

I discovered this map on Cartographia, a blog has been inactive for many years. The blog post illustrates the historical importance of this map as it shows the beginning of the decline of Napoleon III's empire. His party was clearly losing popular support as shown by the absence of yellow on much of this map. Shortly after this election he began a war with Prussia in order to boost his legitimacy. The Franco-Prussian War was a disaster for France and spelled the end of the Second Empire. A detailed history can be found on the blog post.


See a large, high resolution version of the map here.

Under a Black Cloud!

This map is part of a paper addressed to the Republican National Convention of 1884. The purpose was to complain about the Northern Pacific Railroad holding title to "unearned" lands. These lands were granted to the railroad company for the purpose of constructing rail and telegraph links from Lake Superior to Puget Sound. The grants were made in 1869-70. By this date (1883) the company had only built a few small trunk lines, possibly just to keep their hold on the land in black above.

These lands were unavailable to homesteaders as long as the railroad held them. The company was accused of using stealth tactics to hang onto huge amounts of valuable coal and timber lands.

"The head of every true American should hang in shame that hair-splitting Congressmen have been found who, regardless of the duties of their office, have, at the command of their corporation masters, supported this contention by their arguments, their votes and their obstructive tactics."

The paper seeks a clear position of the party. "They do not want meaningless phrases or equivocal expressions, but earnest, honest words and work."

The map shows 40 and 50-mile limits from the proposed main and trunk lines in black as land unavailable to the public-"the crooked, tortuous and angular course of the railroad lines being only parallel by conduct of the Company itself."
Here is the edge of the "black cloud."

Hate Trumps Love

Racist incidents have spiked significantly since last week's election. An article in Time Magazine documents many of these. The Trump Hate Map shows that this is not a regional thing but a nationwide phenomenon.

From Time:

“Since the election, we’ve seen a big uptick in incidents of vandalism, threats, intimidation spurred by the rhetoric surrounding Mr. Trump’s election,” Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center told USA Today. “The white supremacists out there are celebrating his victory and many are feeling their oats.”

I don't normally like to spout off about politics on a map blog but anyone who cares about basic decency ought to be concerned.

Here's an Interesting Election Map

I'll be honest - I've been very sick of election maps for quite some time now. For the last four years we (maybe I see this more than non-mappers) have been exposed to constant re-hashes of the 2012 Presidential Election - cartograms, hexagons, county-level, even more detailed, should we make the close results purple, gray or black? 3D? It's kind of a shame because there are interesting cartographic problems and ways to solve them here but the overexposure kills it for me.

Anyway, I saw this map in the Washington Post and it's pretty cool. 

The presentation is a bit complex because there are numerous variables being shown. Each triangle is a county. The height represents the total votes cast while the width at the base is the margin of victory. Bold triangles represent landslides, defined as "50%" - I think this means 50% vote differential. These are most common in the largest cities and smallest rural counties, particularly ones in the rust belt where the election was decided. The typical red and blue color scheme is used.* The rotation with east up was probably done for better web presentation and causes momentary confusion because it looks "wrong".

I like that the red and blue states are subtly colored so they don't overwhelm the important data here. I don't expect this type of map will become popular - the message takes some reading to decode but it's a nice break from the usual maps and mapping debates that we'll be seeing for years to come.
The full map is here - it's the second map, the first one is worth a look too.

* When I first began making election maps in the 1980's, we had blue for Republican and red for Democrat. I think television news flipped this and now we all take these colors for granted.

Theoretical Nation States of Europe

I came across this map recently showing the possible sovereign nation states of Europe. The full map can be linked here.

There's lost of fine detail with most of today's countries being carved up into smaller units.

Even smaller states such as Latvia and Lithuania are subdivided.

The map extends far enough east to include the ethnic jumble of the Caucasus.

They were able to find capital cities for most places, even tiny little Morpeth in Northumberland, but nothing for Basque Country.

Of course a map like this is by nature subjective and bound to upset people, especially those fighting for or against independence. Here are a few things I wonder about:

• Is England really that divided?
• Is Ireland really that united?
• When did Athlone become the capital of Ireland?
• What country includes the midlands of England - is it really part of the Isle of Man?
• Is Occitania really that different from France?
• Seems like northern Italy is divided into the medieval city states but not the South.
• I think there are biases towards and against certain countries here but I don't want to speculate too much not knowing much about the origin of this map.

Burma's Ghost Capital Turns 10

Ten years ago today Myanmar (or Burma) suddenly moved its capital from Yangon (Rangoon) to Napyidaw, an area of rice paddies and sugar cane fields.

While the above map via mapsofworld shows many points of interest, the few westerners who have visited the secretive capital have described a mostly barren city full of empty superhighways as detailed in these pictures from the Daily Mail and the Guardian.

 An aerial view from Here Maps shows lots of empty space in the middle of town.

From the Guardian article.

The purpose-built city of Naypyidaw – unveiled a decade ago this year – boasts 20-lane highways, golf courses, fast Wi-Fi and reliable electricity. The only thing it doesn’t seem to have is people...

 

Muslims Don't Support ISIS Either

We get a lot of confusing results when looking at how much support ISIS has in the Islamic world. This is because large numbers of unscientific opinion polls show widely differing results. Metrocosm created this map, based on six different scientific polls.

Except for Syria, support for ISIS is very low - even 0% in Iran and Lebanon.* Contrast this with the perceived support in the United States:


These are the types of perceptions that cause rednecks to throw pig's heads at mosques and this illustrates the dangers of the media relying on social media and other non-scientific opinion polls.

I am no expert of what makes a poll "scientific" but the questions and polls cited for the above map can be found here.

* 0% in any poll should arouse skepticism.

Canadian Election Maps - The Good, Bad and Ugly

I hesitate to criticize another country's election maps but come on! This is Canada - you people invented GIS! I'll start with the ugly and work my way over to the good so I end on a positive note.

Here is the National Post's interactive map.

Granted, this is interactive so you can zoom in as needed but still the emphasis on Canada's Arctic waters in the default view makes the smaller places (where almost everyone lives) hard to see. Also, it's ugly, and the Mercator projection makes it uglier and harder to read. Finally, being a conservative paper, all that red must be making their eyes water. Their non-interactive maps are much better (see further below)

BAD: Here is a cartogram from The Star.

 This is a cartogram? So the liberals won the north of every province and the conservatives the south? Compare British Columbia with the interactive version.

The cartogram is interactive. Click a dot and you will see that there is no relationship between its position on the diagram and its geographical location resulting in misleading information. If the goal is simply comparing numbers then the Globe and Mail version is the way to go.

When you click on the cells above, the map takes you to that individual Riding (I love that term!) Also, they have a nice list of key Ridings underneath their interactive info.

This map also came from the Globe and Mail - nicer looking, better projection and it includes St Albert among the important cities - what???

On the good side of things the National Post has this excellent graphic that lets you compare the vote from the last three elections.

I like the detailed city maps - except they forgot St Albert!