Redistricting App: How you can help get partisan data

I know it’s been almost 6 months since my last post. Time flies when you’re…working a lot; ok, I was having some fun, too.

A couple of people have sent in partisan data, which I’ve uploaded. North Carolina has been there since early June (thanks Peter!), and New Mexico is there today (thanks Neil!). And I fixed the VTD data for Indiana. (Thanks to all of you who reported that bug.)

Also, I’m ready to accept other partisan data from volunteers! Here’s how.

If you are able to track down 2008 presidential data that somewhat matches the 2000 voting districts (or census block groups) for a state, you can put that data in a .CSV file (comma separated values) and email it to me. The trick is that voting districts often change and many have between 2000 and 2008. Some states don’t have voting districts published by the Census Bureau, so that’s a problem. If you want to do more work, you can try to map the 2008 data back through any changes from the 2000 voting districts.

For CA, NY and TX, JeffMd created new shapes to (roughly) match 2008 voting districts. In general, I would not recommend this.

Anyway, check out the web page describing what to do and we can get more partisan data in the app so we can have more fun until the new 2010 census data comes out.

BTW, I will attempt to make some improvements to the app and will get 2010 census data in there after it comes out.

Thanks!

21 thoughts on “Redistricting App: How you can help get partisan data”

  2. Somehow it’s just not showing correctly on the images.

    Here is SoCal on redistricting. I’ve checked both “Use Test Data” and “Partisan by Color” – it doesn’t work.

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    This problem seems just limited to California’s partisan data. I can get demographic data:

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    And with other states I can also get partisan data. Texas, which is just slightly less complicated than California, works. So does New York:

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    Any suggestions on how to fix this problem?

  5. I’d be willing to fix the bugs with Maryland. Maryland has a lot of votes unaccounted for, and a lot of mismatched precincts. It seems the state mostly created new precincts from the boundaries of old ones, so it’s just a matter of summing the data where necessary (in addition to moving the ones that are in the wrong place).

    Some of it kinda bothers me (the McCain precincts in the middle of the majority-black part of Baltimore, that random 84% Obama precinct in Anne Arundel that should be in the Ft. Meade area and not in the middle of the state, the fact that half of Cecil County seems to be missing, the fact that Ocean city is on Assateague Island and the black precincts in Worcester county are mismatched – I could go on…

    I don’t know much about other states, so would you like me to help with fixing Maryland?

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