Mark Newman is a coauthor of The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the Way We Live (2008) in which digitally modified maps (called cartograms) depict the areas and countries of the world not by their physical size but by their demographic importance on a vast range of topics. It's an interesting exercise in computer animation but most of the cartograms, if not all, miss the target way off, i.e. information visualization for a particular country. If you can't recognize countries, why a “map”?

Here, on the right side of each picture below, are the Newman's cartograms related to the election 2012. On the first picture the states are colored red or blue to indicate whether a majority of their voters voted for the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, or the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, respectively. While on the left side the states are present in their true relative size, in the Newman's cartogram the sizes of states are rescaled to be proportional to their number of electoral votes.

The second picture gives the county-level election results using the same red/blue distinction.

One way to reveal more nuance in the vote is to use not just two colors, red and blue, but to use red, blue, and shades of purple in between to indicate percentages of votes. The third picture presents the normal map and the cartogram for that instance.