Okay, so I have this awesome map of the results of the 1988 presidential election:
It breaks down the popular votes by county, with an inset map showing the electoral votes break down. And there are two small charts, one showing the total number of poplar votes and the other showing the total number of electoral votes for each candidate (Bush: 48.9 million, 426 electoral; Dukakis: 41.8 million, 111 electoral).

I love this map for two reasons. The first is that it very eloquently demonstrates how a candidate who only received a strong majority of votes in a handful of locations (color intensity indicates how much of a majority they had) and won by a margin in the popular vote (Bush received 54% of votes) can still achieve a landslide victory in the electoral college. The second is that it predates the “Red State, Blue State” system introduced back in 2000. In looking at this map today, our instinct is to assume that Dukakis won in the blue counties and should have won the election. Nope. Historically, red is the color of liberals (like how red is equated with communism).

When reading the description of the GIF-fiti visual assignment and looking at the examples of Animated Banksy gifs, this map came to mind. I though it would be really cool to animate some sort of graffiti message across it, or perhaps do something funky with a couple of the states. My ideas, however, exceeded my Photoshopping skills. I probably could have used some sort of graffiti font or brush set, but I didn’t feel like digging, because I decided to do something a bit more educational…

If you have trouble viewing the animation, open the image in a new window.

This doesn’t even remotely fit the assignment’s instructions, so I’m going to be submitting it as a suggestion for a new visual assignment on creating animated gifs that are semi-educational (akin to The Oatmeal’s famous gif on SOPA). Here’s hoping my idea is accepted!