The Dot Map of the 2020 US Election

After both the 2012 and 2016 U.S. Presidential elections Kenneth Field of Esri made impressive dot maps showing where people had voted for the Democratic and Republican candidates. Kenneth has now completed and released his dot map of the US Presidential Election 2020.

The US Presidential Election 2020 interactive shows around 160 million dots (158,383,403), or one dot for every person who voted in the election. On the map blue dots were used to show Democratic votes and red dots to show Republican voters. If you click on the map you can read a more detailed breakdown of the number of Democrat and Republican voters in the selected county and which candidate won the county and by what margin.

The dots don't show the actual locations of voters in each county but are randomized within populated areas. Kenneth's map is a dasymetric dot map. This means that that the county level election data has been distributed as individual colored dots within the county in the areas where people actually live.This leaves areas where people don't live empty (because there are no voters there). The result is a dot map which reflects more truly how many people live in the rural and urban areas of each county.

You can learn more about how Kenneth made the map on a two part blog post on the Esri website, Experiments with Dot Density - Part One and Experiments with Dot Density - Part Two. And, if you are interested, you can view Kenneth's U.S. Presidential Election 2016 dot map here.