As Ned Used to Say: "Hot Graffix"

Sometimes when I work - particularly when I was in school - I "go down the rabbit hole." I take one turn, follow one tangent, tunnel vision kicks in, and then hours later emerge miles from where I started, legs asleep.

Today's started with one graphic (please click to enlarge) that I was putting together for a newsletter:
It is the basic breakdown of which candidate won which district, and I probably should have stopped there. Two things bugged me though: first there is no indication of population density, and second, this type of map suggests major regional divisions, obscuring a more nuanced story.

Inspired by the elections maps that distort the US states by population, I began by calculating what percentage of the national vote (valid only) each district brought in. Rounding the numbers I came up with 101 squares, each representing about 40,000 votes or almost 1% of the total valid votes cast. I mashed them into the form of the districts, yielding the figure at left.

It does a fine job showing the population trends - Dili (bright green) is huge, explaining in part Horta's success, and other districts become tiny (Manatuto, blue, not really helping to explain Horta's success).

But this figure didn't quite work either. I then overlayed it onto the map (below, colors correspond to top figure). Better? Not quite. Done this way, the map suggests that Araujo garnered over 30% of the vote. I needed to show both population and the breakdown among candidates.
Which led me to the final figure. Again, each color-coded square represents roughly 1% of the national vote.* The white squares represent the aggregate votes for the candidates that did break 40,000 votes in the district. Once you get the hang of reading it, it's pretty cool.
Looking over this monstrosity with my boss, we decided that while it was not going to fly with a general audience, some other elections geeks out there may enjoy it.

* The distibution of squares is based on multiplying the percentage of the total vote a district represented times the candidates performance in that district. For example, if Ermera composes 10% of all valid votes nationally, and Candidate A won with 40% of the vote in Ermera, 4 squares go to the candidate. Note that becuase of having to round the numbers, and the high number of candidates, there is around a 5 % margin of error.