Mississippi 2015 General Election Precinct-Boundaries and Selected Election Results

## RDH Date Retrieval
10/04/23

## Sources
2016 Mississippi 2016 Precinct Boundary Shapefile via[ VEST](https://redistrictingdatahub.org/dataset/vest-2016-mississippi-precinct-and-election-results/) and Mississippi Precinct-Level 2015 Election Results via [OpenElections](https://github.com/openelections/openelections-data-ms/tree/master/2015).

## Notes on Field Names (adapted from VEST):
Columns reporting votes generally follow the pattern: 
One example is:
G16PREDCLI
The first character is G for a general election, P for a primary, S for a special, and R for a runoff.
Characters 2 and 3 are the year of the election.*
Characters 4-6 represent the office type (see list below).
Character 7 represents the party of the candidate.
Characters 8-10 are the first three letters of the candidate's last name.

*To fit within the GIS 10 character limit for field names, the naming convention is slightly different for the State Legislature and US House of Representatives. All fields are listed below with definitions.

Office Codes Used:
AGR - Commissioner of Agriculture and Commerce 

## Fields:
Field Name Description
UNIQUE_ID  Unique ID for each precinct  
COUNTYFP   County FIP identifier        
County     County Name                  
Precinct   Precinct Name                      
G15AGRDGRE Addie Lee Green (Democrat)   
G15AGRFTOO Cathy L. Toole (Reform)      
G15AGRRHYD Cindy Hyde-Smith (Republican)
G15AGROWRI Write-in (Other)             
            

## Processing Steps
2015 precinct boundaries are estimated from the 2016 precinct boundaries available in VEST's file. In all but a handful of instances, precinct names matched across 2015 to 2016, and were assumed to have stayed the same across the two years, in instances where they were not, boundaries were joined using a combination of polling location information and comparing total votes across the elections. 

Additional statewide contests are available in OpenElection's precinct-level file, although these results have not been checked for typos and may differ from official state totals. These results are not included in this file.

For this file, there are 125 fewer votes for G15AGRDGRE than in the official state totals, 5 fewer votes for G15AGRFTOO and 112 fewer votes for G15AGRRHYD. These differences appear in Holmes, Lee, Lincoln and Marion counties. Official state totals award G15AGRDGRE 61 additional votes and G15AGRRHYD 14 additional votes in Holmes County, G15AGRDGRE 64 additional votes, G15AGRRHYD 86 additional votes and G15AGRRHYD 5 additional votes in Lee County, G15AGRRHYD 2 additional votes in Lincoln and G15AGRRHYD 10 additional votes in Marion. We were unable to resolve these differences.
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Visit the RDH GitHub and the processing script for this code [here](https://github.com/nonpartisan-redistricting-datahub/pber_collection)

Please direct questions related to processing this dataset to info@redistrictingdatahub.org.