Skip to main navigation Skip to main content
Ky.gov

Voters

Voter Residency FAQs

​​​​​​​​​

​Finding Out Where You Vote

To be eligible to vote in Kentucky, you must meet certain residency requirements.  Under state law​, a voter's residency is determined by establishing “the place where his or her habitation is" – where a voter's home is.  To make sure Kentucky voters are registered to vote where their home is located, the State Board of Elections uses highly detailed Geographic Information System (GIS) technology to accurately locate voters' homes in the correct voting precinct.​

To see the GIS map of Kentucky's electoral boundaries, click on the image below.


download.png​ 


​

​Frequently Asked Questions

​​​

Because the location of your home decides your ballot. 

Two homes on the same street can get different ballots if a district line runs between them. To hand you the correct ballot, election officials must know exactly which side of every line your home sits on. That means placing your home precisely on the map, not just knowing your street name or zip code. Get it wrong, and you could end up voting for candidates who don't actually represent you, or missing races you should be voting in. Precise mapping protects your vote.​

The location of your home puts you inside several overlapping maps, each with its own boundaries. Each map determines a different part of your ballot: 

  • Congressional districts decide who represents you in the U.S. House of Representatives. 
  • State Senate and State House districts decide who represents you in​ Frankfort. 
  • County districts (often called magisterial districts) decide seats like your county magistrate or commissioner. 
  • City limits and city council districts decide your mayor and council members, if you live in a city. 
  • School board districts decide who sits on your local school board. 
  • Judicial districts decide which judges appear on your ballot.
  • Voting precincts are the smallest pieces of all. Your precinct decides where you vote and which​ exact ballot you get.

Different lines, different line-drawers: 

  • The Kentucky General Assembly draws Congressional, State Senate, and State House districts. This happens after each U.S. Census, every ten years, in a process called redistricting.
  • Local governments draw local district lines, such as city council, magisterial, and school board districts. 
  • County boards of elections draw the voting precinct boundaries within their county. Precincts must fit inside the bigger districts without crossing their lines, and each precinct should hold roughly the same number of registered voters. 

The State Board of Elections doesn't draw these lines, but it collects, reviews, and keeps the official digital maps for the whole state.​

Before computers, boundary lines were drawn the old-fashioned way: written descriptions and paper maps. Written descriptions included measurements from known points such as a residence, or a physical feature of the terrain. A precinct boundary might read something like "follow the creek to the old highway, then north along the railroad tracks." 

This process often caused problems. Creeks shift. Roads get renamed. Landmarks disappear. Two people reading the same description could honestly disagree about where the line was. Over time, counties moved from hand-drawn paper maps for electoral boundaries to digital files, and Kentucky law now requires those digital files so everyone is working from the same precise map.

GIS technology is digital mapping software that can stack many layers of map data on top of each other, like transparent sheets.

Kentucky law ​requires counties to send their precinct maps to the State Board of Elections as digital files made with ESRI ArcGIS, the leading mapping software used by governments across the country. These files must be "georeferenced," which means every boundary line is tied to real coordinates on the Earth, using Kentucky's official State Plane Coordinate System. 

The State Board of Elections uses the following GIS technologies:

  • Esri ArcGIS Enterprise (ArcGIS Server) for publishing map services. 
  • ArcGIS Pro for editing and maintaining precinct boundaries. 
  • Esri Shapefiles and File Geodatabases as standard exchange formats with counties. 
  • ArcGIS REST Services for sharing election geography with other agencies and applications.​

​Kentucky law ​requires every county board of elections to submit its official digital precinct boundary file to the State Board of Elections. Any time a county changes a boundary, that change must be submitted as well. 

This boundary data becomes part of Kentucky's official geographic information clearinghouse, which in 2022, the General Assembly made “the sole database of geographic information maintained by state agencies."​ The coordinates used for the boundary data follow the Kentucky State Plane Coordinate System (the mathematical framework and grid system that gives the data its accurate physical shape, alignment, and geographic location on a map), which under law, is “mandatory for all Executive Branch Agencies…to manage geospatial data​."​

The State Board combines the official digital precinct boundary files of all 120 counties into a single data file for the entire state, creating a single, legally recognized picture of the state's electoral boundaries. 

When there are questions about where a home is, the State Board's maps are the official answer under the framework of the law, not a third-party website or an old paper map in a filing cabinet.

​​​The State Board of Elections uses the GIS technology required under ​state law ​to identify where voters' homes are located and place them in the correct voting precinct. The determination made by the State Board of Elections is for electoral purposes only.​