What do electoral boundaries and geography have in common? Lots, of course, but we rarely see this side of redistricting publicly exposed. This has changed drastically in British Columbia with the launch of the latest official Electoral Boundaries Commission website.
Despite the complexity of two distinct sets of boundaries, they have risen to the geographical challenge. On the BC-EBC website you can find the proposed boundaries and supporting information available in multiple formats, including Google Maps, Google Earth, and good old Shapefile:
Visiting the Google Maps link for my home riding takes you to a search interface showing the district outline and some basic information on population, area, and divergence from the provincial average. Be careful with this app, it’s pretty memory-intensive.
The Google Earth representation allows you to see the boundary without attributes:
And the Shapefile version has the boundaries and all of the summary attributes (shown in FME viewer, link is to a zipfile):
This is a GREAT job. Congratulations Daniel Hirner and crew, and to BC-EBC as a whole for supporting this kind of transparency!
Now, I just need to find a source of historical voting by postal code, and I’ll know the results before the voting even starts :)
-J
P.S. I think I spotted some gerrymandering (just kidding):
There is also a VERY cool time animation of the electoral boundaries in BC:
http://www.bc-ebc.ca/boundaries/maps/historical_maps
Here’s a challenge: see if you can locate Gracie’s Finger
Actually, you have found a case of gerrymandering – my cousin Larry lives at those exact coordinates in a lean-to. It’s always been a fight between him and those that live in the subdivision that don’t take too kindly to him selling his wares behind their house. They know no bounds – going after the weak and puny like that.
Thanks for posting this – great to see the work they’ve done. I think my home town was split in half by new boundaries, causing total confusion. Now I’ll have to go see where they really fell.