Arkansas 2022 Primary Turnout and Registration by Party Aggregated to 2020 Voting Tabulation Districts (VTDs)

## RDH Retrieval Date

02/03/2022

## Sources

L2 Individual Level Voter File for Arkansas 2022 Primary (Dated 06/30/2022)
[Arkansas Block boundaries (2020) from the RDH (originally from the US Census)](https://redistrictingdatahub.org/dataset/arkansas-block-boundaries-2020/)
[VTD Block Assignment file from the US Census](https://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/maps-data/data/baf2020/BlockAssign_ST05_AR.zip)

## Fields

VTD20			Unique VTD Assignment which is the 3 Digit County FIPS - VTD (e.g. "001 - 000011")
DEM_PRIM_VOTE22	Number of voters who voted in the Democratic Primary on May 24th, 2022	
OTH_PRIM_VOTE22	Number of voters who voted in a primary other than the Democratic or Republican Primaries on May 24th, 2022
REP_PRIM_VOTE22	Number of voters who voted in the Republican Primary on May 24th, 2022
DEM_PRIM_REG22		Number of registered Democrats based on party registration and analysis of most recently voted as of 06/30/2022
GRE_PRIM_REG22		Number of registered Greens based on party registration and analysis of most recently voted as of 06/30/2022
LIB_PRIM_REG22		Number of registered Libertarians based on party registration and analysis of most recently voted as of 06/30/2022
NON_PRIM_REG22		Number of registered Non-Partisans based on party registration and analysis of most recently voted as of 06/30/2022
REF_PRIM_REG22		Number of registered Reformers based on party registration and analysis of most recently voted as of 06/30/2022
REP_PRIM_REG22		Number of registered Republicans based on party registration and analysis of most recently voted as of 06/30/2022

## Processing Steps

Load in individual level L2 voter file data for Arkansas, block shapefile, and VTD block assignment file.
Make point shapefile out of lat,long fields in voter file and spatial join with block shapefile.
Clean voter file block assignments for those that receive multiple assignments (falling on a line between two or more blocks) by selecting the first block in ascending order. See Additional Notes below for more context.
Join VTD BAF with individual level voter file data using block assignment.
Create a pivot table grouping by VTD assignment for party registration to create fields containing counts for each party
Repeat the pivot table process for ballot type in the 2022 primary.
Join the two pivot tables together and clean by renaming columns.
Provide statistics on the number of voters dropped in the aggregated file because they lack lat,long coordinates. 
Export the file as a CSV.

## Additional Notes

Not all voters in the voter file have a lat,long and therefore not all voters can be assigned a block nor a VTD. 
18,814 out of 1,593,326 registered voters  are lost in the aggregation process due to not having a lat,long assignment, or having a lat,long assignment that is not in Arkansas.
Of those who voted in the Democratic and Republican primaries, 785 out of 94,054 and 4,640 out of 343,639 voters, respectively, are lost for the same reasons.

As described in processing steps, voters who have a lat,long coordinate exactly on a line between two or more blocks must be assigned to only one block to prevent double counting. Since this data is aggregated to VTDs, in most cases the choice of which block assignment  to use is arbitrary, as all relevant blocks are contained within the same VTD. For 33 people, the block options are in different VTDs and the choice of block would affect the aggregated VTD totals. The most this choice would affect a single VTD is 3 people.

You can view the processing code for this request on our GitHub [here](https://github.com/nonpartisan-redistricting-datahub/Processing-Requests/tree/main/Arkansas_Primary_Tournout_2022_VTD_02_03_2023)

For a 'raw-from-source' file containing block shapefile and VTD BAF, contact info@redistrictingdatahub.org. 
Individual level voter file data cannot be provided.