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by padobson 5227 days ago
How specific do you get with Voter precincts/districts? The census site has voter districts from 2000 and 2010, but some of those are changed every year.

Any applications built to analyze elections data with map overlays require this data, and it's really hard to come up with some 250k voter districts from disparate sources.
1 comments
5vforest 5227 days ago
What kind of districts do you need? The CensusShapeConverter can easily be extended to grab any of the data from the Census, which you can browse a list of here: http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tgrshp2010/tgrshp2010.ht...

And yeah, you're on point about redistricting being a complete f'ing headache. Do you know if there's any centralized government source for maps of redistricted precincts?

link
padobson 5227 days ago
Centralized? Not any that I know of.

Secretaries of State seems to keep shapefiles of their districts, but its never all of them. Check those websites first.

Local boards of elections are required to keep some record of the precinct maps on hand, but in many places aren't required to keep past ones - so it is in fact impossible to keep historical GIS data for some counties. There's also a lot of cases where records are simply kept as pencil or pen sketches, and no shapefiles exist.

You want to build a majorly disruptive business? Provide brain-dead-simple GIS tools to boards of elections so they can re-draw their own district maps every year. Offer them to software for free, and then resell the data they create to people building campaign tools - or build your own campaign tools and sell those.

link