Crowdsourcing Pres-by-CD: Florida Precinct Results

According to the Census Bureau, thirty of Florida’s 67 counties are split between multiple Congressional districts. (The remainder are all located entirely within single CDs.) Unfortunately for us, the state of Florida does not publish results by CD, which means that calculating pres-by-CD for FL requires digging down into precinct-level results.

Frustratingly, the Florida Division of elections doesn’t publish that information either. However, there is good news: Florida’s county-level election departments almost universally do. I’ve gone through all thirty split-county websites to try to track down this information. I was successful in all but two counties – let us know if you have any luck with Alachua and Jefferson. (UPDATE: Jefferson County sent me a spreadsheet in response to my email request to them, which you can find here.)

Anyhow, I’ve posted links for every set of precinct data I could find in this new spreadsheet. The linked files are in a variety of formats. Some are nicely parsed Excel or CSV files, some are clean TXT or HTML files, and some are thorny PDFs. (One non-split county, Glades, even posted a handwritten chart!) The most sophisticated sites will give you a choice of formats.

No matter how you slice it (and at the precinct level, you’re slicing it awful thin), there’s a lot of data to work with. Miami-Dade’s file, for instance, is over 2,700 pages. As Crisitunity observed, we’ve picked off most of the low-hanging fruit already, so bigger projects are what remains. But as Crisitunity also noted, with a million nerds pecking away at a million keyboards, we can accomplish just about anything we set our nerdly minds to.

So if you want to start tackling the big prize of Florida, check out the spreadsheet and have at it! And if you have any thoughts or strategies for how best to pursue this project, please share them in comments.