2008 Nationwide Precinct Map Project - (Mostly) Complete!

[Adam Griffin]

So I've never seen a precinct-by-precinct map of a set of presidential election results online (btw, if there is one of say, the 2008, 2012 or any other presidential elections, please let me know because this then becomes kind of moot), and was wondering if anyone here would be interested in creating one?


Finished interactive map (can be clicked/zoomed in on!) here.

Alright, so I've put all of this together into a tentative webpage that makes it a bit more aesthetically-pleasing to access the content.

Here are revised images with Kentucky (Click on the image for a larger view):

Nationwide:


Mid-South:


Mid-South couldn't be hosted in our gallery because the picture size is too large.

Here is a link to the new Southeast Google Fusion Tables Map, which includes Kentucky:
Southeast

I am also going to make the shapefiles available for those who want to download them and use a GIS program to view later tonight or tomorrow.  I'm not sure if we can include Kentucky in the download for legal reasons, though.  Adam Griffin has asked for clarification.

Finally, here are maps of the 2008 Presidential results in Alaska and Hawaii (Click on the picture for a larger view):

Alaska:


Hawaii:

Regional closeups are below.  Since I started with California, I generally split the states along the border of Northern California stretched eastward.  I had to split the Southeast into Mid- and Deep South due to shapefile size.  As usual, click on the image for a larger view. Clockwise from the Northeast:

Northeast:


Mid-South:


Deep South:


South Central:


Southwest:


Northwest:


Upper Midwest:


Great Lakes:


I can zoom into any map level, so I can make maps of cities or metro areas by request.

[JerryArkansas]

Adam, I'll get Arkansas for you, but you need to contact Miles, he may have NC and LA done already, or he could help you with both states.

[Miles]

Adam, it actually shows you what the zoom level is in DRA; its up in the left corner, IIRC. For all the years, I've used DRA, I just noticed that a few months ago! Do you have the zoom level for those maps?

[JerryArkansas]

Adam, it actually shows you what the zoom level is in DRA; its up in the left corner, IIRC. For all the years, I've used DRA, I just noticed that a few months ago! Do you have the zoom level for those maps?

I believe it is zoom level 10, at least that is what I could see.

[homelycooking]

I think this is a fantastic idea, but I see a few potential problems with this:

1. The finished image is likely to be so large as to be incompatible with most devices. Granted, I work on a PC made in 2007 and am not aware of the performance of newer machines with respect to huge images, but I can't imagine that it would be possible to work with an image in MS Paint much larger than 10,000 pixels². It would be impossible for me even to create a basemap at this zoom level of Texas or California.

2. Even with the zoom level selected, precincts in the major cities will be almost indistinguishable from one another and impossible to color. I think it might be a good idea to use insets.

3. A minor consideration: Within the state of Maryland, some precinct boundaries show detail of the coastline (Worcester) and some don't (Anne Arundel). I hate that. When I made my 2012 precinct map of Maryland, I drew in the coastline by hand where necessary, but it added hours of boring work to the project.

[JerryArkansas]

Adam, here is the state of Arkansas all done.  (warning: old computers may crash when looking at this full-size):

Full-sized

[Adam Griffin]

Adam, I'll get Arkansas for you, but you need to contact Miles, he may have NC and LA done already, or he could help you with both states.

Thanks for providing AR!

Adam, it actually shows you what the zoom level is in DRA; its up in the left corner, IIRC. For all the years, I've used DRA, I just noticed that a few months ago! Do you have the zoom level for those maps?

Yes, as jerry said, it appears to be zoom level 10, BUT...I swear that when I was doing VA/MD, there were two different zoom levels. For VA, it was definitely level 10, but unless I horribly miscounted - twice - Maryland only fit with VA at level 9 or level 11 (can't remember which). I'm wondering if somehow the size of the state can alter this in some way?

I think this is a fantastic idea, but I see a few potential problems with this:

1. The finished image is likely to be so large as to be incompatible with most devices. Granted, I work on a PC made in 2007 and am not aware of the performance of newer machines with respect to huge images, but I can't imagine that it would be possible to work with an image in MS Paint much larger than 10,000 pixels². It would be impossible for me even to create a basemap at this zoom level of Texas or California.

2. Even with the zoom level selected, precincts in the major cities will be almost indistinguishable from one another and impossible to color. I think it might be a good idea to use insets.

3. A minor consideration: Within the state of Maryland, some precinct boundaries show detail of the coastline (Worcester) and some don't (Anne Arundel). I hate that. When I made my 2012 precinct map of Maryland, I drew in the coastline by hand where necessary, but it added hours of boring work to the project.

1. Yes, I'm worried about this. This is why I mentioned that there would have to be some way of uploading it to a site or server where it can be used in some of the ways that old, high-resolution artwork and very large files are displayed and can be zoomed in upon at a tiny level. This should take the strain off of any computers viewing it.

I think ultimately, piecing them all together will prove to be more difficult. I've been able to edit images with up to 15,000 pixels of width/10,000 pixels of height before fairly easily on a seven-year old computer with upgraded memory and graphics (I've never had to/tried to make images larger than that resolution), but the one major issue is - even with individual states - having to zoom in closely and scrolling to your legend. If you don't and you accidentally color the boundary instead of the precinct interior itself (and with the way I render these maps, most of the map boundaries in question will end up being color contiguous), you spend 5-10 seconds waiting for the "error" to complete so that you can undo it. I've had this happen at least 50 times so far on just what I've colored in MD. If you do zoom in and constantly have to scroll, well, that is a time-waster in and of itself.

2. For instance, how much smaller will precincts be in NYC than in Baltimore? At the resolution I've made this, it was a bit of a pain to color but not to necessarily identify precincts in places like Balitmore, Atlanta, etc, but I can see NYC precincts being even smaller.

3. Yes, this is wholly frustrating to me, too, but I'm not sure that I personally could justify all the extra manual work for such an insanely-huge project.

[Adam Griffin]

Because of what I mentioned earlier about the potential issue with zoom levels being at different sizes depending on the state (I'll check again for sure later), I'd like to do this from the following approach. I think it's actually a good idea even if the zoom issue isn't a problem. I'd like to work our way out from VA/MD by doing states that are a) contiguous to completed ones. This way (and I'd highly recommend verifying this before completing an entire state), they all fit together as intended. I usually just take a sliver of an existing state map, paste it into paint, take the first screencap of the new state that borders the previous sliver, and see if they fit. I then know I have a perfect fit.

[homelycooking]

New York City at zoom level 10:

[homelycooking]

My approach to dealing with this problem is usually to zoom way out, so that working with the whole image is feasible. Then you zoom in for insets, lots of 'em. My thinking is generally that seeing a population center in detail is more important than seeing it directly within the context of the surrounding geography.

The other option is to keep a city like New York at the same scale as the rest of the state. You'll still be able to broadly see that the city is heavily Democratic, but picking out an individual precinct or neighborhood would be impossible.

Here's an extreme example of the insets approach:



Many of those towns would simply appear black (from the precinct boundaries) if there were no insets - the shades of blue wouldn't even be visible. Even at this zoom level, I still had to break Alberta into three parts in order to be at all able to work with the images!

[Adam Griffin]

New York City at zoom level 10:

Where else in the US do you think we'd run into a NYC-like problem?

[JerryArkansas]

I think we would run into a problem in the Northeast, and around LA, maybe in Dallas and Houston.  In DE, you cant really see any of Wilmington at all.

[homelycooking]

Philadelphia, Chicago, Northern New Jersey, South Florida and San Francisco come to mind.

[JerryArkansas]

Crap, here, I forgot that I have DE done already.


Full-sized

[Adam Griffin]

Great job, jerry! I've added to the map and will upload later.

Two important things to note:

I had some months ago began building one of these for the Southeast - as of now, I have GA, SC, AL and part of TN completed. The E TN section lined up perfectly with VA done at zoom level 10, but the TN/GA portion of the map only matches NC at zoom level 12. This presumably means that zoom level 10 VA will line up with zoom level 12 NC. This seems to prove my theory about different states having different zoom levels, for whatever reason.

Speaking of which...I think I have a workaround for conjoining such a huge map. If and once complete, we'll simply create an image map that is much smaller and consists of multiple sections; clicking on one of the sections will load up the selected region's map (this may be a good way to handle insets as well, instead of loading the map up with them in legend format). Here's an example piece of such an image map:

[Miles]

Adam, I'm not sure if you've seen this but someone did a national map straight from DRA. It was made before some states had partisan data, but it gives you an idea of what a national map would look like (except we'd have Atlas colors):

[Adam Griffin]

Adam, I'm not sure if you've seen this but someone did a national map straight from DRA. It was made before some states had partisan data, but it gives you an idea of what a national map would look like (except we'd have Atlas colors):

Ugh, this makes me very sad. Although like you said, it's not complete and frankly not in the format I'd like to see (solid colors + Atlas colors). It's also not big enough to truly appreciate the grandiose-ness of our elections, so I guess I'm still undeterred.

[Adam Griffin]

Glorious news! All of my Southeastern states fit with NC (and also fit with VA/MD, but I don't seem to have the processing power to get them to fit with one another as of now), so we have AL, GA, SC, NC, VA, MD, DE & part of TN so far.

Full-size image (may crash older computers)

Project Progress:

[cinyc]

Are you using the 2000 or 2010 voting district lines for your map?

What I can't figure out is what Dave Gardow uses as a voting district.  If Dave's lines are the same as the Census Bureau's VTDs, coming up with a nationwide map would be as simple as downloading the 2008 or 2010 (depending on which you are using) VTD shapefiles for each state, using MapWindowGIS or a similar mapping program to load all 50 states, and creating a map at whatever zoom level you want.  There might even be a way to do this using Google Maps online so that you could zoom in or out to your heart's content, though I don't have experience in using Google's online mapping app.  

Edited to add: Not all states have VTD shapefiles.  Dave Gardow uses something else in the states that don't have them.

VTDs don't directly match precinct lines, though, so if Dave is using VTDs, I don't know where he got the VTD-level data from.  (On the other hand, it's not necessarily easy to find population data for actual precincts, if he is using precinct maps, though I suppose it can be done through aggregating census blocks).

The Harvard Election Data Archive has aggregated precinct-level results for recent elections and put the spreadsheets online.  The problem, as always, is finding the corresponding precinct maps for each year when trying to map the data.  Harvard's archive has posted some state precinct shapefiles, but not all.

[cinyc]

Here's an example of what I can do with MapWindow GIS, the .csv files from Dave's Redistricting App, Excel, Open Office, and the shapefiles from the Census Bureau.  Below is a map of the block group level (CA only) and Voting District level (aka 2010 VTD) results in the Southwest.  For simplicity, I'll refer to these areas below as "precincts", but they really aren't the same thing in many states:



Light grey "precincts" cast no votes.  Dark grey "precincts" were ties.  Click on the image for a larger-sized map in our gallery.

No, I didn't individually paint the "precincts" - that would have taken forever, especially in California, where Dave Gardow's results are broken down by Block Group. MapWindow GIS did.

This is a work in progress.  I can add other states when I have time.  Dave's Redistricting App didn't have any election results for Oregon, so I can't add those - and whatever other states he is missing.   I can add whatever county or municipal lines you want, as long as there is a Census shapefile for it.  Census' municipal lines tend to be over-inclusive, though.

Also, since I started with California, the map's projection is based on California, which is fine for a Southwest map, but might make the East Coast look weird. I probably need to reproject the maps to center on Michigan, which seems to be industry standard.
 
Is this what you were looking for?

[Хahar 🤔]

Why does Clark County have so many areas with no votes?

[Smid]

That looks great cinyc! Awesome work! And I'm also glad that Homely posted his Albertan example, which is still one of the greatest pieces of mapwork on this site.

Just a quick question, cinyc - judging from how blue most of Utah is, and how red the North Coast of California is, and how blue the central part of California is - is the key correct?

[homelycooking]

I think the density of voting district boundaries in the Central Valley is giving the false impression at that zoom level that it's very dark blue.

[cinyc]

That looks great cinyc! Awesome work! And I'm also glad that Homely posted his Albertan example, which is still one of the greatest pieces of mapwork on this site.

Just a quick question, cinyc - judging from how blue most of Utah is, and how red the North Coast of California is, and how blue the central part of California is - is the key correct?

You're right.  I used the Red Racing Horses key instead of the Atlas key.  I'll redo when I have time.

[cinyc]

Why does Clark County have so many areas with no votes?

Military bases and mountains.