Census and election data joined together for use in redistricting and voting rights analysis.
The ALARM Project is glad to provide precinct-level demographic and election data from the 2020 decennial census and the Voting and Election Science Team which have been tidied and joined together using 2020 precinct boundaries. Where 2020 precinct boundaries are not available, Census block-level data is provided instead, and where no VEST data is available, only demographic information is provided. Code to generate the data from these sources is included; the entire workflow is open-source and reproducible.
Download individual states’ data below, or download a ZIP of all the data here. Our repository also contains more detailed data, as well as code and instructions for programmatic downloading, adding shapefile geometries, and other use cases.
Please make sure to cite the Voting and Election Science Team and the U.S. Census Bureau. Consult the license for information on modifying and sharing the data and/or code.
al_2020_vtd.csv
ak_2020_vtd.csv
az_2020_vtd.csv
ar_2020_vtd.csv
ca_2020_block.csv
co_2020_vtd.csv
ct_2020_vtd.csv
de_2020_vtd.csv
dc_2020_vtd.csv
fl_2020_vtd.csv
ga_2020_vtd.csv
hi_2020_block.csv
id_2020_vtd.csv
il_2020_vtd.csv
in_2020_vtd.csv
ia_2020_vtd.csv
ks_2020_vtd.csv
ky_2020_vtd.csv
la_2020_vtd.csv
me_2020_vtd.csv
md_2020_vtd.csv
ma_2020_vtd.csv
mi_2020_vtd.csv
mn_2020_vtd.csv
ms_2020_vtd.csv
mo_2020_vtd.csv
mt_2020_vtd.csv
ne_2020_vtd.csv
nv_2020_vtd.csv
nh_2020_vtd.csv
nj_2020_vtd.csv
nm_2020_vtd.csv
ny_2020_vtd.csv
nc_2020_vtd.csv
nd_2020_vtd.csv
oh_2020_vtd.csv
ok_2020_vtd.csv
or_2020_block.csv
pa_2020_vtd.csv
ri_2020_vtd.csv
sc_2020_vtd.csv
sd_2020_vtd.csv
tn_2020_vtd.csv
tx_2020_vtd.csv
ut_2020_vtd.csv
vt_2020_vtd.csv
va_2020_vtd.csv
wa_2020_vtd.csv
wv_2020_vtd.csv
wi_2020_vtd.csv
wy_2020_vtd.csv
Each data table contains several identification columns, a set of census-derived demographic columns, and a set of VEST-derived election columns.
GEOID20
is the unique identifier for a precinct or Census block.
The state
and county
of the precinct or block are also provided.
Census variables are prefixed with pop_
or vap_
, depending on whether
they are for the entire population or the voting-age population.
Suffixes refer to racial and ethnic categories, as follows:
_hisp
: Hispanic or Latino (of any race)_white
: White alone, not Hispanic or Latino_black
: Black or African American alone, not Hispanic or Latino_aian
: American Indian and Alaska Native alone, not Hispanic or Latino_asian
: Asian alone, not Hispanic or Latino_nhpi
: Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone, not Hispanic or Latino_other
: Some Other Race alone, not Hispanic or Latino_two
: Population of two or more races, not Hispanic or LatinoElection variables consist of average vote counts for Democratic and
Republican candidates. The adv_##
and arv_##
columns report the
average vote count in the ##
election, across all statewide races
contested by both parties. The ndv
and nrv
columns further average
the vote counts across all available election years. For specific statewide
races, you may download the files in vest-2020/
and join them to the data
using the GEOID20
column.
redist
package.geomander
package.PL94171
package.censable
package.blockpop
package.To produce election data using 2020 precinct boundaries, election results were projected down to the 2010 block level using voting-age population as weights. Results for 2020 blocks were then estimated using 2010 blocks and the land-use-based crosswalk files from VEST. Finally, 2020 blocks were aggregated to 2020 precincts using the Census’ 2020 block assignment files.
If you are looking for a similar construction for 2010 data, please see here.
For attribution, please cite this work as
Kenny & McCartan (2021, Aug. 10). ALARM Project: 2020 Redistricting Data Files. Retrieved from https://github.com/alarm-redist/census-2020/
BibTeX citation
@misc{alarm2020census, author = {Kenny, Christopher T. and McCartan, Cory}, title = {ALARM Project: 2020 Redistricting Data Files}, url = {https://github.com/alarm-redist/census-2020/}, year = {2021} }