Voting Districts Day 13: Rework and Shapely Saves the Day

I reached an impasse a while back after realizing that I needed a means of determining whether voting districts shared boundaries.  I built the algorithm to cluster the voting districts together, but the clustering fell apart when my initial points were out in the wilderness or towards the end when the process had slim pickings.  Here's an example of my starting points (green Xs) and the final central points (pink diamonds) for each clustered group.  you can see it completely fell apart at the western part of the state.

Enter the Python module Shapely, which has a great touches function where you can see if two voting districts share a boundary, which I can make a requirement before associating a voting district with other districts.

Additionally, shapely does a lot of other great things that makes this process much easier.  One of the big ones is that it allows you to create polygon objects, which has lots of helpful methods, such as finding a centroid, getting the bounds and area, etc.  

So, I'm working on reworking pretty much everything to use the Shapely module.  Stay tuned.