Tomorrow’s Election Day in the United States of America, and here’s a reminder of how much one vote can matter.
In 1994, a Connecticut congressional race came down to just four votes out of 186,000. That’s right—four votes decided the winner, and it became a headline story in The New York Times. As a senior Political Science major, I was working with a coalition of student groups on the University of Connecticut’s Storrs campus. We registered nearly 1,000 students to vote. In an election that close, those votes certainly had an impact. This was one of only eight Congressional elections in the entire 20th century won by single digits.
So if you’re debating whether to vote, remember: it can literally come down to a handful of ballots. Make it count.
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Cartogram – a type of map in which geographic areas are distorted in proportion to a specific data attribute rather than representing their actual physical size.
The image above is from Bloomberg’s CityLab MapLab, featuring their 2024 blank presidential cartogram, ready for the first results. This cartogram minimizes physical geography and instead highlights election outcomes by resizing each state according to its electoral votes. This approach avoids the visual bias of traditional election maps, which can misrepresent popular support by giving equal visual weight to areas with vastly different populations.
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(Note: Yes, I voted by mail from Spain.)
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