FORGET THE RED AND BLUE
EVEN YOUR EDITOR fell for the red and blue state maps that showed Bush winning the better part of America, leaving Gore with a string of outposts along the coasts. What was forgotten in this impressive display is what Sara Irina Frabrikant, a self-described spatially aware professional and mapematician in the geography department of UC at Santa Barbara ,points out with a series of fascinating maps: "A person not familiar with the US voting system might wrongly assume that Gov. G.W. Bush is winning the election, considering that two thirds of the US is shaded in red. Indeed, Bush won 29 of the 51 states (at the time of writing), but only 246 of the electoral votes."
Fabrikant draws instead a "value by area" map" in which "the size of each enumeration unit is scaled based on the magnitude of total population within each state (1997 data)." The result is something much bluer.
http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~sara/html/mapping/election/map.html
PS: Should you conclude from Frabrikant's somewhat intimidating language that geographers don't have any fun, you might wish to check out some of her other pages.