I want to generate blank county-outline maps of various states & color or shade in the counties according to how they voted in an election. There could be 5 or 6 candidates, each needing his own color or shade.

Questions:
1) Is Map Point the best program to do this?

2)I gather from reading the topics here that you can't eliminate city names (but can print them in really tiny fonts). Does the same apply to county names, or can you eliminate them completely?

3) Are there any other map features you can't eliminate--in short, is it possible to have a blank county-boundary-only map of, say, Texas?

4) If Map Point can't do this really simple thing, is there some program out there that can--that doesn't cost the earth?

MapPoint should be perfect for you.. although you don't have complete control of the different layers and names, most of the time it's a good thing as it makes it a lot simpler. The Map Styles and changing the font size is more than enough for most people.

As long as it is counties and states and not custom or odd territories such as districts, MapPoint is probably your best bet. You can get a fully functional trial for ~ $15.

Eric

I have a page that plots the results from a famous election at the county level:

http://www.winwaed.com/products/mapp..._florida.shtml

This is a bit more complicated than what it sounds like you're trying to do. I was try to visually correlate different data.

For what you want, you could create a spread sheet. Put the state in one column and the county names in another. Then put the winners in a third column. Use the MapPoint Data Import Wizard to read the data.
Choose the shaded area map.


Richard