Monday, October 26, 2015

Locations and boundaries of electoral polling stations


Question

I'm interested in georeferencing polling station results for federal elections and I'd like to know: has anyone managed to get their hands on data for the locations of polling stations (address or point file) and/or the boundaries of polling station catchment areas (boundary file or postal code/address range)? The closest I've found are the pollbypoll and pollsresults CSV files for the 41st election, which provide community names for the location of polling stations but nothing more granular than that.

Answer

What about this from geogratis:

http://geogratis.gc.ca/api/en/nrcan-rncan/ess-sst/c0fdfa13-8851-5ade-abaf-09445d390d31.html

In ArcMap it looks like there are some polling division boundaries (polygons) and stations (points) for 2011. Could be used as a basis for other years…

Also, just an FYI the polling station results are also available in odesi, back to 1997 here in case they aren’t readily available online