As I’ve mentioned before, election night is one of my favorite nights of the year. All the big media outlets pull out their infographic design “big guns.”

One of my favorites for the Super Tuesday 2008 Primary results is at the New York Times:

It simply describes the current situation in the largest states that vote on Super Tuesday. I can quickly tell what percent of precincts are reporting, and know instantly which results should remain stable. One thing that I find a bit strange about this graphic, however, is the fact that the states are laid out in alphabetical order, rather than a more informative order. My preferred order would probably be a descending order starting with the state with the most delegates. The alphabetical order has led me to ask myself the question, “Why didn’t Obama focus more on the states following ‘I’ in the alphabet? And likewise, how come Hillary focused on ‘M’ through ‘Z’?” Strange coincidence.

Now, for a little compare and contrast, check out the live results from CNN.com’s homepage:

This graphic just seems to be lacking a whole lot of substance. Unlike the NYTimes graphic, it’s hard to abstract the big picture. We don’t know as much without looking a little deeper at the numbers. They even went out of their way to include a legend in the bottom right, as if we didn’t know what the check stands for. There is also very little contrast between the state abbreviations and candidate names. The state abbreviation is only one pixel larger than the candidate name, certainly not enough to denote a difference in meaning (most people won’t notice they are different sizes at all).

Finally, just for good measure, let’s have a look at NPR.org‘s entry:

The information that NPR adds here is the closing time for the polls in each state. I don’t know if this is really all that important. Really, what most people want from a graphic like this is to find out who is winning in each state. A nice addition is the number of delegates committed from each state. I would have liked to see these numbers tallied up at the bottom, because that’s what this race is really all about. Also, this graphic makes it somewhat difficult to tell if there is a clear winner on either side. For all I know, McCain and Huckabee might be neck-and-neck (which they’re not). Overall, not bad.

My personal fav is the NYTimes graphic, but judge for yourself. I’d love to hear (and see) your favorite Super Tuesday infographics. Send me a link in the comments.