Title: TIGER/ESRI Congressional District Data
Originator: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Geography, NRCS, and the Farm Production and Conservation (FPAC) Business Center.
Abstract:
This layer represents the political boundaries for the U.S. congressional districts. The TIGER/Line shapefiles and related database files (.dbf) are an extract of selected geographic and cartographic information from the U.S. Census Bureau's Master Address File / Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (MAF/TIGER) Database (MTDB). The Census MAF/TIGER database represents a seamless national file with no overlaps or gaps between parts.
Congressional Districts are the 435 areas from which people are elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. After the apportionment of congressional seats among the States based on census population counts, each State is responsible for establishing congressional districts for the purpose of electing representatives. Each congressional district is to be as equal in population to all other congressional districts in a State as practicable. The TIGER/Line shapefiles for the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Island Areas (American Samoa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands) each contain a single record for the non-voting delegate district in these areas. The boundaries of all other congressional districts are provided to the Census Bureau through the Redistricting Data Program (RDP).
NRCS performed the following steps to produce the dataset served on the Gateway:
- Downloaded from : https://www.data.gov/ and https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/cbf/cbf_cds.html
- Added and populated fields for the Representative’s name and website from https://www.house.gov/representatives
- Added and populated a field to indicate the political party of the Representative
- Added and populated a field to indicate the 2-letter State abbreviation
- Copied polygons Palau (7099), Marshall Islands (6899), and Fed. States of Micronesia (6499) from 114th map -"no representation"
Note: TIGER contains the following remnant polygons due to extension into the water. They were left in this file:
- 17ZZ Illinois
- 26ZZ Michigan
- 09ZZ Connecticut
Format: vector areas – ESRI shapefile
Spatial Reference Information: Decimal Degrees, WGS 1984. Original layer in NAD 1983.
