The New York Times has built a very detailed map of the 2020 election using the data they have currently (they built something similar in 2018 for the 2016 election). The data is not yet complete, with “detailed data from 1,922 of 3,143 counties in 42 states, representing 64% of all votes cast”. They even did the thankless, herculean, brain-breaking work of scraping state and county data and building out a GIS election map and put it on a public repo with details about the data and the GeoJSON available for download.

I’m a huge fan of the data explainers The Uphsot puts together and commend them for this work. Looking at the map, though, being over one third incomplete, I have to ask: why now? The impression this map creates is deeply misleading about the actual results of the election — a problem with all maps of U.S. elections that overrepresent empty counties — but this is stark. And given the election’s big loser continues to insist he won despite all evidence to the contrary, this incomplete map is certainly going to fuel disinformation.

The Times should, of course, continue to do the important work of informing its readers. The journalists who build these also need to recognize every map brings with it a bias that we know will be exploited by cynics and disinformation purveyors who don’t give a damn about journalists’ good intentions.

As these maps show, the fact of a thing and the truth of it aren’t always the same. And that divergence is only growing.