Aside from the icky political aspect, several interesting things have emerged from the 2000 US presidential election results (or lack thereof):
- an example of how not to design an election ballot
- a spoof of said ballot by Amazon.com, who continues to impress me as a company that knows what they are doing (aside from that whole unavoidable .com impending bankruptcy issue).
- a well-done map of the election results by county. The NY Times does some really good work with charts and graphs....well, better than the USA Today anyway.
- a map with an alternate view of the same information, where the size of the states is not geographical but rather is based on electoral size. I'm not sure it conveys any more meaningful information than the previous map, but it's good information design.
- the extent to which the press does not convey the correct information to the public. 13 Myths About the Results of the 2000 Election attempts to clear the air.
- a comparison between statistics that seemingly support a given conclusion and statistics that actually support that conclusion. The first graph shows that Buchanan got a lot of votes in Palm Beach County compared with other counties, but it doesn't tell you whether that amount of votes is anomalous. The second graph, depicting a proper statistical analysis, does indeed show that Buchanan received many more votes than he should have under normal circumstances. (And guess which one they kept showing on the news and in newspapers...)
