MassGIS Data - Massachusetts Senate Legislative Districts (2012)

January 2013

Overview

The Massachusetts Senate Legislative Districts (2012) datalayer reflects the state Senate district boundaries as defined by Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 57: Section 3. These 40 districts are those used in the Fall 2012 elections and beyond, until they are redrawn. The names of the statewide datalayers are SENATE2012_POLY (polygons) and SENATE2012_ARC (arcs). These replace the older SENATE02_ARC and SENATE02_POLY layers.

View and query these data in the Legislative District Viewer. Users may search for their district based on municipality, legislator, or district name. When identifying the districts, the results contain links to their senator's Web pages.

Click to see the full size image.

Production

Staff at the Massachusetts Senate developed this layer with its contractor, Caliper Corp. (Newton, MA), using Maptitude for Redistricting software. MassGIS appended the 1:100,000 coastline and state outline and added the senators' name and party attributes. Final election results were obtained from a "Return of Votes" report (in PDF format) from the Secretary of State.

Attributes

The SENATE2012_POLY attribute table has the following fields:

FIELD NAME		WDTH / TYPE		DESCRIPTION
SENDISTNUM		5 / I		Senate District number
SEN_DIST		43 / C		Name of Senate District
SEN_FIRST		13 / C		First name of Senator
SEN_LAST		15 / C		Last name of Senator
SEN_PARTY		3 / C		Senator's political party
SENATOR		40 / C		Senator's full name and party
URL		150 / C		Senator's Web site address

In the SENATE2012_ARC attribute table, the item OUTLINE is coded as follows:

• 0  =  Internal district boundaries
• 1  =  State
• 2  =  Coastline

Maintenance

MassGIS maintains the layer and will make updates as needed. In January 2013 the polygon attributes were updated with the information for members of the 188th General Court. Also see the state House and Congress data layers.

Last Updated 1/4/2013