How to Build Geocoded Precinct Boundaries from Address Lists: the Italian Case

20 Pages Posted: 20 May 2022 Last revised: 27 Feb 2023

See all articles by Gabriele Pinto

Gabriele Pinto

Sapienza University Of Rome, Department of Social Sciences and Economics; Government of the Italian Republic (Italy) - Ragioneria Generale dello Stato (RGS)

Date Written: April 29, 2022

Abstract

Electoral results at the national and regional level are today relatively easy to retrieve for many countries thanks to decades of collecting efforts. However, things get complicated when we need to access detailed and granular-level electoral results (such as precinct data). We introduce two novel methodologies to reconstruct the approximate polygons of precincts from voter's address lists that rely on the Voronoi diagram and Census blocks shapefile. Using these methodologies, we build a new Geographic dataset of electoral results for several Italian cities covering the last 20 years (1999-2021) of different types of elections (national, regional, municipal, and referendum). The proposed methodology is scalable to other Italian cities and countries that provide voters' address lists without geographic coordinates, opening the possibility of studying granular geographic data related to electoral results. We also offer a framework to validate the methodologies and show how those perform against an externally hand-drawn dataset. We made the dataset available on a public repository.

Keywords: precinct data, election dataset, italy, GIS

Suggested Citation

Pinto, Gabriele, How to Build Geocoded Precinct Boundaries from Address Lists: the Italian Case (April 29, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4096926 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4096926

Gabriele Pinto (Contact Author)

Sapienza University Of Rome, Department of Social Sciences and Economics ( email )

Piazzale Aldo Moro 5
Roma, Rome 00185
Italy

Government of the Italian Republic (Italy) - Ragioneria Generale dello Stato (RGS) ( email )

Via XX Settembre 97
Rome
Italy

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics

Downloads
295
Abstract Views
971
Rank
160,465
PlumX Metrics