[Leica] Blue and Red and American Politics

[reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us (Brian Reid)]

In 1994 Digital Equipment Corporation produced the first live Internet 
election coverage, of California statewide races, and used the red and blue 
colors to show Republican and Democratic results. We were well aware of the 
traditional use of blue by Republicans and red by Democrats, but decided to 
swap them because the graphics worked better. We updated our blue/red maps 
every 30 seconds.

http://www.infopeople.org/about/mailinglists/archived/origarchive/0304.html

We repeated this for the US national and presidential elections in 1996, 
where it had tens of millions of viewers.

http://www.allbusiness.com/government/elections-politics-campaigns-elections/7208052-1.html

We worked in 197 with the governments of 2 other countries to produce 
realtime maps for elections that had more than 2 political parties.