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Updates To Political Districts & Voting Precincts datasets April 2015

Author · Mike Heagin
Published · Apr 29, 2015
Last modified · Mar 20, 2024
Category · SGID Updates
Read time · 2 min

Utah Political Districts:

Political districts for state-level offices (Congressional, State House, State Senate, and State Board of Education) are available as a GIS data layers. These districts are for elections and ongoing representation.

Small administrative changes have been made to the political district boundary GIS layers, after requests for determination made to the Lt. Governor's Elections Office.

Specifically,

  1. The GIS representation of the County Boundary line between Salt Lake and Summit, in the Parleys Summit area was adjusted to fit a shared understanding of the subdivision boundary between Summit and Salt Lake County ;
  2. The administrative representation of the US Congress Districts 1 and 2 boundaries were adjusted in the GIS layer to fit the agreed upon County Boundary in that same area;
  3. The administrative representation of the Utah Senate Districts 2 and 19 boundaries were adjusted to fit the agreed upon County Boundary in that same area

New Utah Voting Precincts:

Political.VistaBallotAreas, a statewide GIS data layer depicting voting precinct and subprecinct boundaries is also available. This dataset is compiled from the County Clerks and is actively used in the 26 of 29 counties that have adopted a GIS-based process to manage precinct-to-residence assignment within VISTA, the statewide voter registration database.

Precincts can be formed (and subprecinct divisions eliminated) by performing a gis 'dissolve' operation on the Precinct field. This dataset has not yet been edited to eliminate very small gap and overlap slivers and or to align to the highest resolution of the county boundaries.

Utah is one of only several states to integrate GIS functionality into elections management, a task that requires data standards, coordination, and geospatial services and infrastructure for accurately locating addresses and making spatial queries.

This dataset is expected to change annually as counties need to realign precincts to agree with local boundary changes and to divide precincts whose voter count grows over the course of the year to exceed the maximum number of voters allowed per precinct (currently 1250 voters) Current data has been updated through April 29, 2015.