Post

As much as I like lovely exercises like this, we need to stop saying that the choropleth map is "misleading". It can be misleading *if you don't know how to read it for the purpose it was created for*—to show who won were, nothing else. The problem isn't the map, but its improper interpretation.

I lean toward greater designer responsibility rather than reader. Choropleth maps are designed for areal unit sizes approx constant wrt thematic attribute. Where that relation breaks down, we get noise. Where geographic size systematically relates to interest (urban-rural) we get problematic bias.

Related analogy: Mercator projected map of world countries could be argued is "a map of which country is where, nothing else", but we know the systematic bias in area-attribute relation is a problem. Most accept a better alternative is to reproject the map rather than require reader to undo bias.