Like other districts after the 2020 Census data was released, the Louisville Metro Council government redistricted their 26 city council seats.
Once the council approved these new districts, an updated shapefile was made available in the Louisville Open GeoSpatial Data Catalog and a precinct assignment file was uploaded to the city's website.
From these two source files, the new districts were uploaded to the DNC & KDP's data warehouse to match to the previous district council configuration. A CROSSWALKS table was created for the full precincts for each district with internal proprietary data which allows the DNC to update these districts within Votebuilder.
However, as some precincts were split by 2020 Census Blocks, the DNC was not able to assign voters in these precincts to Metro Council districts for the December 2021 update. On future updates, voters in these precincts will be processed a different way to match them to their new Metro Council districts based upon census block. The DNC expects that by either February or March 2022, they will be able to make this change available in Votebuilder.
In the meantime, to ensure that campaigns have access to these precincts, these will be manually added to their users assigned districts. To help determine which voters are in a specific district, the KDP Data Director created a CROSSWALKS table that determines a voters Metro Council district by taking their voting address geocode and cross referencing it with the districts' shapefile. From this, the voter's district will be loaded to VAN as a Custom Field called "Louisville Metro Split Precinct District Assignment" (shown below).
Users will need to enter their district number to narrow down to the voters within their district in those precincts. This custom field is only good for voters in split precincts; voters in other precincts will have their districts be accessible via the 'Metro Council' dropdown in Home Districts.
Please note that while most district assignments will be correct, there will be some issues with mapping voters to their correct Metro Council district due to data quality issues (specifically with geocodes). Overall, only 291 Jefferson County residents (out 631,719) are missing Metro Council district assignments, giving these new dropdown and custom field a 99.99954% coverage rate.
These districts have been updated as of January 24, 2022.