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 Chapter 14

Voting district (VTD) is a generic term adopted by the Bureau of the Census to include the wide variety of small polling areas, such as election districts, precincts, or wards, that State and local governments create for the purpose of administering elections. Some States also use groupings of these entities to define their State and local legislative districts, as well as the districts they define for election of members to the U.S. House of Representatives. In a nationwide cooperative program for the 1980 census, the Census Bureau gave States the opportunity to request use of these election precinct boundaries as the boundaries of census enumeration districts (EDs) or, in some areas, census blocks. The Census Bureau began using the term voting districts as it began planning for the 1990 census. This chapter describes the events that led to the development of the VTD program for the 1980 and 1990 censuses, and briefly explains the operations and procedures the Census Bureau used to implement the program.

For many decades, the Census Bureau tabulated and published population totals for wards within certain incorporated places and some county subdivisions, such as minor civil divisions (MCDs) or census county divisions (CCDs). These municipal wards normally were composed of several adjacent election precincts from which voters elected governmental officials such as aldermen and councilmen. Wards have a long tradition in American census taking—from the reporting of population totals by wards in a 1768 census of Philadelphia through the Census Bureau’s publications of ward data after the 1960 census and the 1970 census. The Census Bureau also used the ward boundaries for census enumeration; a ward boundary often was the outer boundary for a group of EDs. The Census Bureau developed plans to report population data by wards following the 1980 census, but deferred the tabulations because of budgetary constraints. During this time, it became apparent that wards had certain drawbacks for purposes of statistical analysis; as electoral subdivisions, their size and geographic composition varied widely, and since their boundaries shifted frequently, they had limited usefulness for trend analysis. In Notes and References Voting Districts14-1