This chapter contains the instructions (mostly verbatim) given to our hand-matchers. It describes exactly our procedure to assign files from the precinct data a column of precinct numbers from the PL94-171 dataset. The purpose of this assignment is to give the electoral dataset a field whose values can be used to aggregate and match its vote data with census data from the STF3a dataset. Precincts and VTDs do not match exactly in most areas, but precincts can always be assigned to one and only one MCD-Group. Thus, the errors created in precinct-to-VTD matches are almost always eliminated when aggregating up to MCD-Groups. We nonetheless try to minimize errors at this lower level of matching in the documentation that follows.
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