unitedstates / districts

GeoJSON and other shape files for the federal legislative districts of the US.

United States Districts

GeoJSON and other shape files for the federal legislative districts of the US.

Supported formats:

• GeoJSON
• KML

To do:

• Shapes for state legislative districts
• TopoJSON

Using the shapes

All files in this repository are automatically published to theunitedstates.io, at predictable URLs.

For example, GeoJSON for New York's 1st district can be found at:

https://theunitedstates.io/districts/cds/2012/NY-1/shape.geojson

The 2012 here refers to the year that these districts came into effect, and is the most current districts. "At Large" districts, where only 1 person represents an entire state or territory, are coded with a district number of 0 (e.g. WY-0 and PR-0).

GeoJSON for the state of New York can be found at:

https://theunitedstates.io/districts/states/NY/shape.geojson

Replace .geojson with .kml to get a KML version of a district.

You can also download the entire set as a ZIP file, and use them however you like. If you plan on using these for heavy traffic, or you want control over the domain name they live on, you should use this method.

Crawling/discovering shape URLs

You can use the Github Repo Contents API to get a quick JSON view of each directory in the repository.

To see a list of all districts in the cds/2012 directory, visit:

https://api.github.com/repos/unitedstates/districts/contents/cds/2012?ref=gh-pages

To see a list of all states in the states directory, visit:

https://api.github.com/repos/unitedstates/districts/contents/states?ref=gh-pages

Other resources

Check out mapshaper for all sorts of helpful map manipulation tools.

These are just static shapes for current districts. If you want to do more, you might use:

• Jeffrey B. Lewis' collection of GeoJSON for every US congressional district, including historical shapes
• The US Census Bureau's API
• GovTrack's Boundary Service API

Public domain

This project is dedicated to the public domain. As spelled out in CONTRIBUTING:

The project is in the public domain within the United States, and copyright and related rights in the work worldwide are waived through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.

All contributions to this project will be released under the CC0 dedication. By submitting a pull request, you are agreeing to comply with this waiver of copyright interest.

districts's Issues

gis.govtrack.us is retired

The venerable GovTrack.us map demo and service is no longer available. I do not know whether you want to replace its link on ReadMe with the aaronpdennis/congress-maps repo Josh links to, or just remove it.

Clarify ReadMe on newest data location

In the ReadMe, it says

For example, GeoJSON for New York's 1st district can be found at:

https://theunitedstates.io/districts/cds/2012/NY-1/shape.geojson

The 2012 here refers to the year that these districts came into effect, and is the most current districts. "At Large" districts, where only 1 person represents an entire state or territory, are coded with a district number of 0 (e.g. WY-0 and PR-0).

I expected this to mean that a given year's folder only contained states whose district boundaries were changed in that year. The 2018 folder has only PA, but 2016 has everybody (not just VA, FL, and NC). Which way is intended? Either way, if the "and is the most current districts" line could be clarified to match the expectation, I think that would be good.

---

If the intention was to avoid data duplication in the repo, here's what I'd suggest: What are the odds that a special directory (now, current, etc.) could be created in cds that contained symlinks to the current map files? It would link to the 2012 districts for NY, to 2016 for FL, and (soon) to 2018 for PA. Then you could drop the states from 2016 who do not have changes and avoid adding everyone (again) to 2018.

NC 02

Hi All,
When should I expect an update for 2nd district of North Carolina ?
It should look like this: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/NC/2
but it looks like: https://ross.house.gov/contact/offices

in general 117th congressional updates.
Also, if any of the maintainers like to mentor me, I am happy to jump in and help out. just point me in the right direction.

Serve combined GeoJSON files?

Wondering if it makes sense to also serve, eg, a single GeoJSON file for all state boundaries together.

(This is just a use-case I've bumped up against time and again, and while GitHub seems like a great platform for geo hosting, I can't seem to find a canonical repo for this. Is this it??? 😄 )

Support topoJSON

Thrilled for this repo. Mike Bostock offered up some wonderful instructions on how to get topoJSON directly from SHP files:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/d3-js/a6VdcMv0VmU

Alaska (state) GeoJSON issue

Check out the geojson file for Alaska under State:

It's different than the one for the At-Large district. I think these should be identical:

Non-voting cds GeoJSON files do not have same format as others

The GeoJSON format for all the latest GeoJSON files have a json schema of {"type": "Feature", "properties": {'Code': 'AK-AL', 'District': 'Alaska At-Large'}, "geometry": {"type": "MultiPolygon", "coordinates": [...]} }

However, for non-voting cds, their format is only the dictionary inside the "geometry", i.e. {"type": "MultiPolygon", "coordinates": [...]}. Now, the AK-0 2012 is the same format, but AK 2016 goes with the format above. I think we should update the non voting districts like AS-0. Please let me know if I should directly update the geojson files in 2012 or create a new directory called 2021 that goes with the new format.

more debugging info: Hear-Ye/find-your-district-and-representatives#2 (comment)

Thanks for this awesome repo!

Update NJ congressional districts for 2022

New districts were adopted Dec 22, 2021 and available here: https://www.njredistrictingcommission.org/adoption2022map.asp

I have some time to make this PR later this week if someone does not get to it first.

Support new PA districts

PA has new districts!

There are GeoJSON files here (https://github.com/R35I5T/dev/blob/master/PA.geojson) which come from the state website (http://www.pacourts.us/news-and-statistics/cases-of-public-interest/league-of-women-voters-et-al-v-the-commonwealth-of-pennsylvania-et-al-159-mm-2017?66). They look right to me.

I'll attempt format them and make a PR later today

Github Pages doesn't support SSL

Anyone who wants to use these shapes, and to use SSL everywhere, is going to have to host them themselves.

I'll update the README to note this, and to encourage users to write Github support to request SSL support in Github Pages.

MongoDB Throws "Duplicate vertices: 64 and 66" in FL-21

2022 House Redistricting updates

These are up-to-date at https://github.com/nickoneill/districts, but they are not all from sources that can be republished CC0. I have a pretty decent workflow for these so I'd like to actually merge 2022 districts when they can be sourced from the census website, but I don't know when that will be.

Feel free to comment here if you get them before I do and I can run my scripts over them to update this repo.

Several states are out of date

FYI there has been redistricting in at least two states since 2012, you may want to update those files. Florida and Virginia changed their Congressional Districts maps for 2016, while it looks like North Carolina will redistrict after the 2016 elections.

NC 2020 missing major cities

Hey, thanks for this great repository!

Just created a GitHub action that compiles all CDS geojson files into one. One peculiar thing is the 2020 NC data is missing major cities like Raleigh and Greensboro. Wanted to know if that was intentionally left out? You can take a look here: https://github.com/Andrew-Chen-Wang/district-autoupdate/blob/checking-if-geojson-worked/districts.geojson

VA CD7 out of date

Virginia 7th district map is pre 2016