Alaska state total votes repeated. Need precincts

[Stoney Vintson]

The Alaska state total votes are repeated. Alaska does report the votes by precinct at http://www.elect.alaska.net/ You can visualize the continental US and then add a map with precincts instead of boroughs (Alaska uses boroughs instead of counties) by using a different shape file for Alaska. ( or you can create lists of precinct for each borough and produce borough totals) You usually need to write additional code to visualize Alaska and Hawaii. If you commit the resultsbyprct.txt fle to the repository, you probably only want the lines with 'US PRESIDENT' in order to reduce the size from 7.3 MB to about 500 kb

[Tony McGovern]

That sounds like the right approach. Generally, Alaska election results are reported at the state-level. See here as an example:
Alaska
Compare to this:
Arizona

My map has Alaska with county-level boundaries but shows the state totals.

[Stoney Vintson]

Just found out that Alaska uses boroughs instead of counties. (I edited the issue above and then noticed your comment afterwards) I have added a file to my data repository with precinct and district results for 2016 Alaska. All of the precinct maps are in boroughs. Using the house district results may require less work.
List of Boroughs in Alaska
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_boroughs_and_census_areas_in_Alaska
2012 re districting in Alaska
https://www.elections.alaska.gov/er_rd_dd_pm.php
2016 Alaska Results reported by precinct and district. ( I filtered out non presidential results )
http://www.elect.alaska.net/
2016 List of Polling Locations ( to understand relationship between districts and precincts?)
https://elections.alaska.gov/vi_w_p_list_poll.php

[schase18]

Hi. Great job. I don't see the Alaska votes by borough file anywhere. Can you point me to it or add it to the repository?

[Stoney Vintson]

There are results for Alaska by precinct. The difficult part is figuring out how to map these precincts to boroughs. It would be best to ask someone in the Alaskan government or a researcher who deals with these issues to get advice.

1. You can download Alaska US Presidential general election data here.
   http://www.elections.alaska.gov/Core/voterregistrationstatistics.php
2. I have Alaskan precinct data that has been filtered to include only rows with "US PRESIDENT" at my repo here
   https://github.com/stoneyv/presidential_general_elections/tree/master/data/elect-alaska-net

[Tony McGovern]

@stoneyv openelelctions is also working on translating boroughs -> precincts. It's a difficult task. Here's their project page (nothing on Alaska yet):
https://github.com/openelections/openelections-core

[Max Seiden]

Curious what the status of this is. Joining on FIPS to a county-level population dataset yields an incorrect national turnout average unless Alaska is excluded.

[Tony McGovern]

This is a difficult task, one without an obvious solution. I'm inclined to remove Alaska from the overall results so national turnout numbers align with county-level components.

An approach I've been considering is to somehow convert precinct-level results to boroughs. For instance, map each precinct's polling location to its corresponding borough.

Here are precinct-level results for Alaska:
http://elections.alaska.gov/results/16GENR/data/resultsbyprct.txt

[Tony McGovern]

@stoneyv A user by the name of "CINYC" on RRH Elections has apparently done the work of mapping Alaska precinct-level results to county-level results for the general election from 1960 - 2016. It seems like a monumental effort.

She (or he) has published the work on Google Drive. I think it would be worth a shot to incorporate those into the final results.