Hi Everyone,
Last night I upload 2.1.2 and this morning I added 2010 data for more states.
New States: DE, KS, NE, NC, WY.
Key fixes:
-- 2010 VT shapefiles are WAY SMALLER, like almost 1/10!!!
-- 2008 Block Group population numbers fixed. It was most noticable in Wyoming, where the app claimed a population of 193,000.
Note: if you use Firefox, you may have to clear the cache to correctly load some states, incl. WA, MO, KS.
http://davesredistricting.com
More below the fold. Cross-posted at SwingStateProject
Shapefiles: As you know from previous posts, the 2010 census VT shapes were way bigger than the 2000 files. I was searching around on the web for help/advice/code and found MapShaper, a web app that allows one to upload a shapefile and then change it. Thank you Matthew Bloch and Mark Harrower. Matthew Bloch is now with the NY Times and apparently responsible for some (all?) of the cool online maps they've been doing. I used the Douglas-Peucker simplification to simplify by 10% and whoa! the files are nearly 1/10 of the size and I bet you can't notice the difference! I am so jazzed about this I've been telling anyone who will listen!
Thank you Tyler for pointing out that the population of Wyoming (2008 block groups) was a bit off :-). This bug has been there for a while, but only shows up if the population data some block groups are split into parts. What happens is there's only 1 shape for the block group but multiple parts in the data. I was only using population from 1 part. For most states, not that many block groups were split, but in Wyoming (and Montana) a lot of them are, making it more obvious. That's fixed and so the 2008 BG numbers should be a lot better.
Note on Oregon. There are no VT shapes for Oregon, just like in 2000. So, I'll have to use block groups for the 2010 data. That will take more work (some tools work, some change in the code). Not sure when I'll get to that.
There are updates to VA and MD for election data to include some average turnouts. I will get to these next week.
Thanks.