In this part of the lab, you will be geocoding address of polling locations in Eau Claire. Navigate to the link, and scroll down to the table titled “City of Eau Claire Voting Sites”. You will need to
After cleaning the data, there should be a total of 20 polling locations.
Next, geocode the addresses and name the layer “poll_locations”. Take a look at the resulting attribute table. Some things to note:
You will have to be signed in to ArcGIS Online in order for geocoding to work properly.
While there are a few different geocoding tools, you should use the “Geocode Addresses” tool.
One (or more) record(s) may not have a perfect score. Discuss differences between the matched addresses locations and the input locations, and use specific examples. Did these discrepancies affect the end result? Why or why not? If no results returned an imperfect score, you can discuss that instead (2 pts.).
Put the original raw data into a generative AI model to clean it and remove duplicates. How does this compare to your manual data cleaning (1 pt.)?
Have the generative AI model find the lng/lat of each polling site. Save the output as a .csv, and add the x,y data to the map. How do the locations compare to the ArcGIS geocoder? Are the results trustworthy? In what situations would a generative AI model be insufficient for geocoding work (1 pt)?
Take a screenshot of the two point datasets in your map document (1 pt.)
During the 2018 midterm elections, bowling night coincided with election day in Marathon, La Crosse, Brown, and Sheboygan counties. The second shift poll workers in these counties misjudged how long bowling would take, and thus were late to their shifts. This mistake caused votes to be tallied later than normal, keeping many Wisconsinites unnecessarily awake late into the night across the state. With threats of bowling night being changed to Tuesdays in Eau Claire ahead of the 2024 elections, the city has tasked your consulting firm with developing a third party vote tallying and verification service. Your firm will travel to each polling station on election night, where you will verify and help count (if necessary) votes at each polling location in the city. Since this must be done quickly and efficiently, you will be using network analysis to (1) assess routes between polling locations (2) and evaluate new polling location service areas.
From the Geoprocessing menu, navigate to Network Analyst Tools > Analysis and select the “Make Route Analysis Layer” tool. Leave all options as default, and ensure that the Network Data Source is set to https://www.arcgis.com.
Next, use the Add Locations tool to add the polling locations to the route.
Next, use the Solve tool to solve the routing problem.
As you inspect the newly created route, you’ll notice that it seems long and inefficient. This is because we did not reorder stops to find the optimal route. Next, we will reorder stops and thus solve a “traveling salesperson problem” (TSP). Note that order does not matter.
What is the length of this new route in miles (2 pts.)?
Which locations should be the first and last stops (2 pts.)?
Create a map of the optimized route that also includes the poll locations and a basemap (2 pts.).
Currently, it is possible that people may have to travel to a location that is not their closest facility in order to vote. To reconcile this, the city is considering changing citizens’ voting locations. In this part of the lab, you will create mutually exclusive service areas from which the city will assign voters to new polling locations.
The default output color scheme will not be sufficient for displaying service area data properly. What type of symbology method should be used? On which field? (2 pts.)
Which facility has the greatest area? (1 pt.)
Include a histogram of the “Shape_Area” variable. (1 pt.)
If you had to suggest a location for an additional polling location, where would that be? Support your answer and take into consideration that the Service Areas that we built touch other municipalities in which citizens are already assigned a polling location not included in this analysis (2 pts.).
Create a map that shows the new service areas, poll locations, and road network. Use unique symbols to represent the service areas and label them (2 pts.).