English: Cartogram of 2004 Electoral Vote for US President, with each square representing one electoral vote. Note that the 286 votes for Bush plus the 251 votes for Kerry are one vote short of the 538 total electoral votes. This is because one elector in Minnesota cast a vote for John Edwards.

The population density of the 50 states varies by three orders of magnitude (from NJ with nearly 1,200 people per square mile, to AK with roughly 1 1/4 people per sq mi). Because of that huge variation, a regular map of the US that is typically used to present electoral vote results can convey a very skewed impression of the outcome where sparsely populated states appear overrepresented and densely populated states appear underrepresented. The cartogram approach of this image eliminates that problem by presenting the area of each state in an exact one-to-one correspondence with its number of electoral votes. But this is achieved at the cost of introducing distortions to the actual shape of each state and their positioning in relation to each other.