Incidentally, I found the 2004 election ones you were looking for, along with a few other years here: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2004/

Those size-by-statistic maps are called cartograms, and you can find a bevy of interesting ones here: http://www.worldmapper.org/textindex/text_index.html

There's a effect, the name of which escapes me, where you read a newspaper column about a story with which you are familiar and notice all the errors, then turn the page to a column about an unfamiliar topic and treat it as authoritative. Anything we can do to put more readers in the first position is good.