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Caprice's Maps and What-Not

A very rough map of districts (or boroughs) in use during the 1619 Virginia House of Burgesses election. English settlement was still very much centered around the James River. Each borough elected two members.

I don't think I've ever seen a colonial election map before! Great work. I love the district names.
 
Now that's very impressive.
To be quite honest, this is nowhere near the hardest map I've made. At least I didn't have to pore over entire pages of legal descriptions.

I don't think I've ever seen a colonial election map before! Great work. I love the district names.
Yeah, it's a whole lot better than present-day America's system of just numbering everything. If only we could return to doing that.
 
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By 1628, the House of Burgesses seems to have abandoned the idea of giving each district two burgesses, and instead just sort of played it by ear. The Charles City districts were pretty sparse, so I sort of extrapolated. Also, "The Plantations Between Archer's Hope and Martin's Hundred" is one of the longest names for a constituency I have ever seen.
 
Also of note: 1631 and already population imbalance means they have to cross a corporation border.
 
Also of note: 1631 and already population imbalance means they have to cross a corporation border.
Yep (technically, 1630, but I didn't post the map because it was somewhat of a mess). I'm not actually sure how they figured population quickly enough to redistrict for every session.

And now, the 1633 configuration, the last one before counties were introduced (and records of members hit a six-year drought for some reason):

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For completeness' sake, here's 1630:

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The final map in this series. For the assembly of 1640, James City County was divided into single-member districts. By the next session with known members in 1642, the county would elect all its burgesses countywide. The next time a county would be split in a Virginia state legislative election would be in 1967, over three centuries later.
 
Today, while procrastinating, I did a map of the 1973 Virginia House of Delegates election. While the House of Delegates always had at least one independent member elected in each election from 1971 to 2011, in 1973 fifteen out of a hundred delegates were elected.

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Since this was so casually done, I don't have a key or total vote share on hand. 65 Democrats, 20 Republicans, and 15 independents were elected, thus being the worst showing for the Democrats since 1887.
 
Excellent maps as always @Caprice . Where do you get the data for things like the 1973 Virginia example? I'm more thinking of boundaries rather than the actual figures, but those too.

And 2018 Michigan appears to be cosplaying as Minnesota from that lack of uncontested seats.
 
Where do you get the data for things like the 1973 Virginia example? I'm more thinking of boundaries rather than the actual figures, but those too.

I get my Virginia results from here; results are given by county, and the only county that was split during the 1970s was split along the same line as the congressional district borders.
 
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