Assembly constituency KML and JSON, from the Election Commission

[Harry Stevens]

I work for the Hindustan Times, where I sometimes make maps. Last year, I made a bunch of maps for the assembly elections where I relied on spatial data files that were pretty good but not perfectly accurate. This year, in an effort to improve the accuracy of our map boundaries, I scraped the KML files directly from the Election Commission's website (http://psleci.nic.in/), which I also converted to GEOJSON. As we are supporters of open data in general, and DataMeet in particular, we have decided to make the files public and share them with you first. Here are the files in JSON and KML: https://github.com/HindustanTimesLabs/shapefiles/tree/master/state/ac.

We also thought it would be a good idea to begin sharing more of the spatial data files we use to make maps, first as a way to centralise and organise all the files we have stored on our hard drives or in the cloud, and second as a way to contribute to the open mapping community. To that end, we'll be regularly updating our shapefiles GitHub repo. There's not much there now, but we're hoping to make it quite robust. Here's the repo: https://github.com/HindustanTimesLabs/shapefiles

By the way, if you're interested in the code used to scrape the AC files, here it is: https://github.com/HindustanTimesLabs/eci-shape-scrape.

- Harry

[Vikas Yadav]

Any clues on how to get shapefile/boundaries at the polling booth level?

[Venkata Pingali]

The electoral list PDF usually has a hand drawn map. But it is not worth the effort (i was involved in such an effort in the past). The boundaries of the booth change every six months and that too in a random fashion. Further the map is often out of sync with the actual content of the voterlist.     

Sent from my iPhone

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[Harry Stevens]

UPDATE: I changed the structure of the directories a little bit. Here's shapes for states and UTs: https://github.com/HindustanTimesLabs/shapefiles/tree/master/state_ut. More to come...

[ravu...@hotmail.com]

Hi Harry,
Thanks for uploading the shapefiles. I opened the Punjab AC shapfiles in R. The constituency names in the shapefile don't match with the current 2017 constituency names (as reported in HT maps posted by your team).  For example, the first few names are

> punjab.shp$AC_NAME    (# R command for extracting names)
  [1] Pathankot   [2]  Sujanpur [3]  Narot Mehra  [4] Dina Nagar 

Please note that some of these names such as "Narot Mehra" is not in the current list.
I would assume that Election Commission source has the current data.

Paramjit Gill
University of British Columbia