Decision Desk HQ: “In January 2011, I sent an email to the Washington State Democratic Party asking about precinct results from the 2008 presidential caucus race. State party chairman Jaxon Ravens replied simply with the question, “Why would you want them?” As he reminded me, the precinct results had no bearing on delegate allocation or the eventual party nominee. My nineteen-year-old self struggled to articulate a satisfying answer. What I failed to put into words was that election results show so much more than simply who won and lost a constitutionally-legitimized popularity contest. Election results lay bare the souls of its voters, translating millions of individual hopes, dreams, fears, aspirations, and biases into tangible, observable quantities. No census or survey can truly capture that singular moment of personal truth which occurs in the ballot box. We can identify your race, your income, a list of a thousand other measurable values which statistically imply the outcome of this moment, but as deterministic as we might try to make it seem, it always comes down to a final act of free will. These individual acts sum to make manifest the inner milieu of a people at a particular moment in time, a secular sacrament ordaining to our political priesthood. Election results tell us who we are while other statistics only hint at what we are; maps visually organize this information in a way both informative and artful. Living on the West Coast my entire life, I’ve never had the opportunity to travel to many of the great population centers of the East, the veiled gulches and hollows of Appalachia, or the wide open country of the Heartland, but through election maps I could learn many things about the people who live there, how they vary, and how they view themselves. Using precinct-level data, I could almost walk the streets of neighborhoods and communities thousands of miles away. They made me feel connected to and in solidarity with a world I have never experienced; they remind me that I too am a part of the American democratic experiment, even if it all too often seems a petty game for out-of-touch East Coast elites…”