Mapping Data
I got the data for my maps from many different sources.
Note that it is really easy now for me to load up more data. If you can make a good argument for adding another layer and have a link to the data, send me email, ducky separator webfoot period com.
Polygons
- U.S. Census Tracts: I got the census tract shapefiles from the U.S. Census Bureau.
- U.S. Counties: I got the original shapefile from the U.S. Census Bureau. Sean Grimland make a clipped version for me, removing coastal water areas from the counties. It is avaiable here, but be warned that it is huge: 1.4G and 9 million vertices.
- U.S. Presidential Electoral Districts: Presidential returns are reported by county everywhere but Alaska; I used the clipped counties as described above; I got the Alaska State Legislature Districts shapefile from the US Census Bureau. (Alaska aggregates federal votes by state House voting district, not by county.)
- U.S. Congressional Districts: I got the 110th Congressional District boundaries from the U.S. Census Bureau.
- Country boundaries: The Mapeteria country boundaries came from from KML generated by KMLer by Valery Hronusov and Michael Barsky.
- State boundaries: The U.S. state boundary information I used in Mapeteria came from a KML file of U.S.States 2004 electoral votes generated by Kevin Khaw. The state boundary files that I used elsewhere came from the U.S. Census Bureau.
- U.S. State Legislature Districts: I got state house (lower chamber) district boundaries and state senate boundaries from the U.S. Census Bureau.
- Neighbourhoods: I got U.S. neighbourhood shape information from the fine Zillow neighborhoods database. I got the Vancouver neighbourhood shapes from the City of Vancouver.
- Zoning: I got the Vancouver zoning maps from the City of Vancouver.
- Many organizations were involved in making the French department maps used in Mapeteria. the geometries came from GeoFla. Conversion from Lambert II+ and WGS84 by done by Convers. I did the reduction of points for the lowres version using an adaptation of the Douglas-Peucker algorithms John Coryat adapted from a program written by Stephen Lime. If you redistribute or adapt derivatives of the French Boundaries KML file, you must preserve the attributions above.
Political data
- USA Today collected some county-based presidential election 2008 voting data very shortly after the election, which M.E.J. Newman put into a spreadsheet. This data was incomplete and sometimes inaccurate, and I spent quite a lot of time going to different county Web sites and transcribing their information. This was not a small job. Mark Brickley helped with Rhode Island (which doesn't have counties per se). My best, updated 2008 spreadsheet is here, but be warned that I have not double-checked each and every one of the voting districts. My data will be close; if you find a better source for county-by-county data, I would love to hear about it. Note that Alaska doesn't vote by counties (called "boroughs" in Alaska); it votes by state house district.
- Anthony Robinson painstakingly compiled mountains of county-level data, including the voting results of the 2004 presidential election, from various sources. I took his data and cleaned it up even more at first. While I ended up ditching it for Robert Vorbei's data (see below), I did spend time cleaning up Robinson's data, looking at many state sites' final results: AK, AR, AZ, CA, GA, HI, IN, IL, LA, MO, NC, NY, OH, TN, TX, and VA. (Note that the proportion of votes for a candidate in a county never seemed way off; it was the totals that didn't look right in Robinson's data.)
- Having established that I looked at a lot of data, I can say that I can believe in data I got from Robert Vanderbei for the presidential 2004 races; he also gave me the data for earlier races back to 1964.
- The information on US Governors' and Senators' party affiliations came from Wikipedia.
- Information on which party controls the state senate and state lower chamber came from Wikipedia, aggregated by hand.
- The "Gov/Sen/Rep/S.Sen/S.House" map counts +1 for each Democratic Governor, US Senator, and US Representative in that district, -1 for each Republican. It then adds +1 for each chamber of the state legislature controlled by Democrats, and -1 for each chamber controlled by the Republicans. Note that Tennessee is a strange case; the House is exactly tied except for one legislator who considers himself a Republican but the Republicans don't.
- The information on the final electoral vote tally of the 2008 presidential election is very widely available, but I happened to pull the numbers from Electoral-vote.com.
- I got the information about U.S. Representatives' party affiliations from AggData, with a little bit of touchup from the official House of Representatives site.
- I got information on state representatives and state senators from the wonderful, wonderful Project Vote Smart. Had I known about it before, I could have gotten information on governors, US senators, and US representatives from it and saved myself a bunch of time!
- Cook's Partisan Voter Index Charlie Cook puts out the Cook Partisan Voter Index; electoral-vote.com compiled it into a handy comma-separated values data file that I used. Note that the measure shows how much more likely a congressional district is to vote Democratic or Republican than the average district; since the average has been going more Democratic, then even a PVI of zero is slightly more likely to go Democratic.
