An election map that better represents American voters.

Every election cycle, we are confronted with a familiar image: an electoral map that shows Republican-majority states in bright red, Democratic states in blue, and states yet to be called in gray color.

On election night everyone is gray the state decisively switches to fully saturated red or blue, turning the country into an uneven chessboard. This stark image divides the country into “red states” and “blue states.”

The media’s use of this binary color format, while easy to interpret, falsely indicates that entire states are either deeply Republican or Democratic. On Election Day, the swing states we watch with bated breath are portrayed the same way as landslide-win states—they’re either red or blue, even when one party won by a narrow margin. This simplification may seem benign, but it is not; it misleads the public and disempowers voters.

Research has shown that binary electoral maps don’t just reflect political divisions, they feed a false impression that we are more divided than we really are. Study participants who were presented with a red and blue map perceived the country as more politically divided and felt that their vote had less influence than those who were presented with a map in which states were shaded in various shades of purple to show voting difference.

Purple cards pose their own problems: They make it difficult to quickly determine who won a state on election night, which is important information. However, while clarity about the winner is important, it should not come at the expense of nuance. My colleagues and I at Harvard Medical School, the University of Virginia, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison tested a simple solution: a red-blue gradient map. States with narrow margins of votes (for example, where the winning candidate received 51 percent of the vote) will appear in the lightest colors, with colors becoming brighter as the margin increases. and states with large majorities (about two-thirds of the vote) will be shown in fully saturated colors. This approach allows viewers to quickly determine the winner, as well as gauge the diversity of voter support in each state.

We found that study Participants who viewed this map instead of the binary red-blue map of the 2020 presidential election were more accurate in their vote margin estimates and had greater confidence that their votes mattered.

Of course, there are many ways to better present election results, including ones that don’t create the false impression that there are more voters in sparsely populated states than there actually are. (After all, the earth does not vote. People do this.)

According to Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan: “The medium is the message.” Moving to a more detailed electoral map may seem like a trivial change, but it is actually a powerful change. This sends the message that America is a country of diverse voters and each of us matters.

Remy Furrer is a behavioral scientist and bioethics researcher working as a research fellow in the Department of Neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.