Been building a collection of geopackages from counties containing current election districts 🗺

Most counties nowadays post their election districts nowadays on their interactive mappers which are backed by ArcGIS REST/services. So you can either Google the REST/services or watch them in the network debugger in the browser to get the URL and then connect to them in QGIS to download the file. Some counties – Allegany and Rensselaer along with New York City and Westchester post shapefiles on their website.

Come redistricting I’m afraid the old election districts will disappear from public view on the servers and won’t be able to obtained easily. But having the old district lines is valuable as you can plot old elections on maps such as the 2018 or 2020 elections than port them over to the new district. Or create cross walk documents that show old versus new election districts. To a certain extent you can use the Voter Tabulation District file put out by the Census Bureau but the problem is that the Census Bureau often collapses small election districts, making it difficult to merge against past local election races.

The state’s LATFOR commission will late this year release election results for recent elections tallied by Voter Tabulation District, that they purchased from a vendor for redistricting purposes. That data will be fairly valuable, especially once they are joined against the new, well updated, election districts created or updated by county boards of elections next year. There is quite a bit of math involved in making the calculations – working with percentages of the old election districts – but I expect I can do a lot of that with PANDAS fairly easy. This might make some pretty maps and interesting analysis of local races.