•Maps: If you've ever tried to project any election results on to a traditional map of U.S. congressional districts, you know that you'll wind up with unreadable tangles of blue urban districts and misleadingly large swaths of red in rural areas. To remedy this age-old problem, Daily Kos Elections' Daniel Donner has developed an awesome, brand-new cartogram that uses groupings of five hexagons to represent each congressional district so that they all appear equally sized.
While some compromises were necessary, of course, the advantages of this map are many: Every state retains a recognizable shape and location, and each seat is clearly visible. And in versions with district numbers, each district is placed about where it ought to be relative to other districts in the same state. So when you map out those same election results, you get a much sharper picture:
