[sperry]

Originally Posted by pbaldy

Oh please, it does no such thing. It simply breaks down the vote down by county, which is more detailed than the commonly shown breakdown by state.

Now I will say that a case could be made that those 1,000 people in Alaska DO (or should) count the same as the 1,000,000 in NY. Those 1,000 people elect a US Senator whose vote counts the same as the senator from NY who was elected by 1,000,000. That's the whole purpose of the Senate; to give equal representation to each state. This was particularly true before they changed the method of election for senators.

In a similar fashion, that's what the Electoral College is, and why we have it instead of direct election of the President. It's an attempt to give smaller states more say (or at least to lessen their disadvantage). If one carried the Senate/Electoral College philosophy to the county level, you'd have that map.

We could debate this endlessly, and I simply posted the map as an interesting observation about the urban/rural nature of the results. I didn’t vote for either guy, so I’m not playing sides (I did vote, just not for either of them).

Now, can't we all just get along?

You said:

Originally Posted by pbaldy

This election may have been close numerically, but geographically it was an 83% - 17% landslide.

and posted the county election map that supports the 83%/17% numbers by square mileage.

Saying that "geographically it was a[n 83%] landslide" *is* saying "the 1000 people that voted in a giant, virtually unpopulated county in Alaska count the same as the million votes from New York, Los Angeles and the Bay Area combined". You're making the conclusion that if our election was counted by square mileage that the vote was overwhelmingly for Bush, as if the population density didn't matter, and as backed up by the map you linked to.

So, I'm saying that statistic, and the supporting USA Today (who are *notorious* for publishing misleading and useless graphics instead of writing articles) map, is a rediculous, and totally useless analysis of the election.

I understand the point of the electoral college, as well as why the House is represented by population while the Senate is given equal seats per state. This map has nothing to do with that. What that map describes is "if the people of the nation we weighted by county square-mileage, the landmass of the US would have reelected Bush president in a landslide".

Now, if you had stated that the map is interesting because it allows a higher resolution inspection of where the Kerry vs. Bush supports live, then I would agree with you. While it doesn't necessarily matter where in each state individual voters live due to the electoral college, it *is* interesting in an accidemic/demographics/curiosity sense. However, comparing square-mileage, as that map's sidebar does and as your 1st statment implied, is abso-friggen-lutely retarded.