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 The townships in Arkansas and North Carolina have no functions except that some serve as districts for the election of county officials or as areas for recording property information. The MCDs in Virginia and West Virginia, called magisterial districts, are areas for the election of representatives (supervisors in Virginia, commissioners in West Virginia) to the county government. The supervisor’s districts in Mississippi serve a similar purpose. The MCDs of Louisiana and most of Maryland are units used for conducting elections within the county. In Louisiana these are parish governing authority districts; in Maryland they are election districts, except for Anne Arundel County in which the MCDs are called assessment districts and used for taxation purposes. In all the above situations, the legal description is shortened to district in the Census Bureau’s data tabulations.

Two counties in Arkansas and two in North Carolina have territory that is not within any township. There the Census Bureau established UTs. The same situation applied to one parish in Louisiana where a portion of territory was not part of any parish governing authority district.

Virtually all incorporated places in Arkansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia are dependent on their MCDs. The exceptions are the 41 independent cities of Virginia and the independent city of Baltimore, Maryland; for Census Bureau data reporting purposes, these entities are statistically equivalent to counties, and each is equivalent to an MCD as well. Also, New Orleans city, which is coextensive with Orleans Parish, is not subdivided into districts and thus is considered a place independent of any district. Arkansas has one incorporated place that is coextensive with a single township; West Virginia has three incorporated places, each of which is coextensive with a single magisterial district (see for more detail). Several places in North Carolina have become independent of the surrounding townships since the 1990 census. County Subdivisions8-25