Drawing boundaries on the map

Thousands of municipalities publish no usable ward or precinct map. Rather than hunt for a file that may not exist, draw the areas yourself. It usually takes a few minutes, it costs nothing, and you do it with your own geocoded household pins visible underneath — so you can see exactly which doors fall where while you are still drawing, which is the whole reason to do it here rather than in external mapping software.

Draw a set

1. 1Open Boundaries in Workspace settings and choose to draw a mapThe map opens framed on your workspace, showing the households you have coordinates for — as individual pins, or as counted groups when there are too many pins to draw. See [What you see underneath at full size](#households-under-the-map).
2. 2Name the set and give it a roleSeat area, voting subdivision, or locality. A drawn set does not have to be an official area at all — “the three neighbourhoods we are targeting” is a perfectly good set, and turfs can be cut along it exactly like a real precinct map.
3. 3Draw the first areaPick up the drawing tool, click each corner around the area, and close the shape back at the point you started. The household pins stay visible the whole time.
4. 4Name the areaWard 3, Riverside, East of the tracks — whatever your team says.
5. 5Draw the restEverything already saved stays on screen while you work. Place a new corner near a corner of a shape that already exists and it snaps onto it, so a shared edge can be traced without pixel-perfect clicking.
6. 6Read the two countsThe map reports two numbers: households in no area and households in more than one. They are counted when you open the map and again whenever you press Check again — after an edit, a notice reminds you to recheck. That is your quality check.

What the two counts are telling you

• Households in no area — a gap, or a genuine outsider. A small number at the edges of your map usually means a seam to close by dragging a vertex. A large number usually means an area you have not drawn yet.
• Households in more than one — an overlap. Two shapes cover the same ground, and at least one of them reaches further than you meant.
• Neither is an error and neither blocks anything. No data is lost either way, and both numbers move as you fix the shapes.

When an address does land in an overlap, which area wins is not left to chance: areas are checked in name order, so the same address lands in the same area on every single run and your reports do not drift between refreshes. Fix the overlap when you get to it; until then, at least the answer is stable.

Finding an area on a big map

Beside the map is the list of every area the map holds. Picking one from the list moves the map to it and frames it, so you do not have to know where it is before you can look at it — which matters on a national map of hundreds of ridings, where the area you want may be a province away from where you are looking. Clicking a shape on the map itself selects it without moving anything, because it is already in front of you. Fit map to everything returns to the whole map and all of your households.

What you see underneath at full size

The households drawn under your areas are the ones inside the part of the map you are looking at, and they are redrawn each time you pan or zoom. That is what keeps the page quick for a real list: a provincial candidate can hold 35,000 households or more, which is far more pins than any browser can draw at once.

• Looking at a whole riding or city, the households are grouped: one shaded circle per area with a count in it, bigger where there are more doors. That is a density picture — where your doors are — rather than a list of them.
• Zoom in, or click a circle, and the groups break apart. Once fewer than 2,000 households are in view they are drawn as individual pins again.
• The caption under the map always says which of the two you are looking at, how many households are in view, and how many your workspace holds in total.

None of this changes matching. Every household with coordinates is matched against every area, whether or not it was ever drawn on your screen.

Reshape, rename, delete

Click a saved area to select it, or pick it from the list. Drag any vertex to reshape it, rename it in place, or delete it after a confirmation. Every change re-runs matching for the whole set, so the two counts and every household’s areas are correct again by the time you look away. Redrawing an area you got wrong is genuinely cheap — there is no reason to leave a bad shape alone.

Three habits that make it quicker

• Work outward from the pins. The doors you actually have are the only part of the map that matters; empty ground can be sloppy without costing you anything.
• Trace a shared edge by snapping onto the neighbour’s corners rather than eyeballing a parallel line. It is faster and it removes the gap and the overlap in one go.
• Save after each area rather than after all of them. You find a seam problem when one shape is wrong, not when twelve are.