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.

[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.

[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?

[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:

[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:

[Adam Griffin]

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.

Using the 2010 ones. In either case, I foresee inaccuracies. I'm not even sure how Gardow makes it work considering that he does use VTD that inevitably had to be changed between 2008-2010.

Here are some problems I (thought) I'd run into with the GIS/CSV/shapefile route. The first one is what I already referenced: precinct boundary changes. I know that in my own home state, it's not uncommon for 10 counties to change their boundaries in a given year. Something like 20% of the counties in GA now have different precinct boundaries from 2008. Finding a shapefile for a particular state and at a particular moment in time is challenging; if you're picky, it very well may be impossible (unless they're buried somewhere in Census data). Now, accumulating 50 states' shapefiles down to the precinct-level/VTD for an exact year...unless there is already a national precinct shapefile out there that I'm not aware of, I don't see how it can be done.

As far as piecing them together...presumably that can be done by loading each one up individually and then saving it once you've loaded them all up in ArcGIS or something similar? I've never bothered to try this for the reasons I mentioned above. I figured for better or worse, using Gardow's data in whatever way possible would be the easiest route in terms of overall accuracy.

I do have some basic experience with GIS and I actually use Google Fusion Tables quite regularly to combine shapefiles/CSV data with election results to make maps that way. One issue with this approach (and presumably it's similar no matter whether you use a GIS program or not) is getting a spreadsheet with election data to correspond with precincts in the shapefile. I know that whenever I tried to do this for GA in Fusion Tables, the columns/names of precincts in Harvard's and the Guardian's files were not configured in such a way that they'd correspond with each other. They could be named/numbered the same and correspond or be named/numbered differently but they'd need to be in the same order in order to correspond shapefile precinct data to election results precinct data.

How are you extracting data from DRA?

[Adam Griffin]

I think Stanford has a page like this: http://web.stanford.edu/~jrodden/jrhome_files/electiondata.htm

But thanks anyway!  I'm really looking forward to this.

Do they have an actual map? I saw their map with the dots; that's sort of what I initially referenced as being not to my standards as far as a map project goes.

[Adam Griffin]

Here are some problems I (thought) I'd run into with the GIS/CSV/shapefile route. The first one is what I already referenced: precinct boundary changes. I know that in my own home state, it's not uncommon for 10 counties to change their boundaries in a given year. Something like 20% of the counties in GA now have different precinct boundaries from 2008. Finding a shapefile for a particular state and at a particular moment in time is challenging; if you're picky, it very well may be impossible (unless they're buried somewhere in Census data). Now, accumulating 50 states' shapefiles down to the precinct-level/VTD for an exact year...unless there is already a national precinct shapefile out there that I'm not aware of, I don't see how it can be done.

Using VTDs and block groups instead of the precinct shapefiles has to be inexact.  I'm not sure how Gardow did it, unless there was some requirement by Census that result data be sent to it when creating VTDs.  I doubt it.

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The =sumif (or sumifs) function is your friend here.  Make a second sheet with the most descriptive column copied from the shapefile spreadsheets as the first column.  Then write =sumif (Sheet1!$A$2:$A$1000,$A2,Sheet1!C$2:C$1000) in cell B2, where Sheet1! $A$2 etc is the corresponding column for the descriptive data on the results page and $A$1000 is the assumed end of the data.  It's easier to create the function by mousing over the data you want than typing the numbers out, then putting the dollar signs in. C$2 etc is the column with the results data you want.  You can copy and paste this function in cells below and to the right of the cell due to the dollar signs.  It keeps the search area constant, changing only the results column when you paste in cell C2 and the lookup cell when you paste into B3, etc.  The =sumif function only works with results data that are numbers, not text.

Well this is just making me feel dumb, because I can't figure out neither the correct way to use the formula nor how it helps sort it all out. Comparing my 2012 shapefile data of Georgia alongside the exported data from DRA, however, already shows me that there's going to be problems: there are 105 fewer precincts as of 2012 when compared to DRA's data.

[Adam Griffin]

Thanks for the explanation - I'll go through it later and see if I can get it this time.

Earlier, I decided to try and do 2012 for Georgia (seeing as how the 2012 Harvard data-set was much more organized and I had a 2012 shapefile for the state). Very few alterations overall had to be made to the spreadsheet, but I've run into a bit of a problem with Fusion Tables:

First attempt at Georgia 2012 presidential by precinct



Maybe there is too much data in the spreadsheet for FT to handle overall. After about 100 entries have copied, it stalls out - a rare problem that has to be corrected manually by Google, apparently. I'm going to try to remove a few columns when I get back home and/or attempt the upload again, and if that doesn't work I'll play around in ArcGIS. The precincts that did manage to get copied are functioning properly, though.

[Adam Griffin]

Very nice! I'm going to get the hang of this sooner or later, but you very well may beat all of us to it. If possible, though, I'd like to get something functioning in an online, zoomable format.

[Adam Griffin]

!!!

[Adam Griffin]

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.

[Adam Griffin]

It's been awhile since this was completed and some may have missed it, so I may just bump it periodically since I haven't taken appropriate steps to ensure this appears in Google Search yet.