What's up with Alaska's election districts?

[minionofmidas]

The reason for the change in the Atlas hasn't been touched on yet. It's quite simple really:
For 2000 and 1996 and such, Alaska published results for day voting by precinct, for postal and "question" (same thing called "provisional" elsewhere, I think) voting by State House District. The 40 State House Districts were therefore the smallest unit for which exact election results were available.
For 2004, there was the additional option of early voting - and that was only reported by these four regions (actually it's even more complex than that. Most of it was reported by these regions, but some was broken further down. I haven't the slightest clue why.)
Therefore, exact figures per State House District are not available for 2004.

[minionofmidas]

Results excluding Early Votes are HERE.

[minionofmidas]

You can see that

HERE.

[minionofmidas]

Yes, exactly. That's why Dave didn't put them on the Atlas.

[minionofmidas]

Because Alaska doesn't have counties. In its more populated areas there are boroughs which act as counties. These boroughs have a city or town at their centre and sometimes serve as the town government as well but theyare as large, or larger, than some states. In the lesser populated areas, the Bush, there are no counties basically its just one huge unicorporated area. The closest thing there is what are called Census Districts which are just arbitrary districts drawn by the Census Bureau to catalogue the data from these remote places.

It has 27 Boroughs that cover the whole state:

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/maps/alaska_map.html

Alaska has 16 boroughs; municipalities; or citiy and boroughs; and 11 census areas.  These 27 areas are treated as county equivalents by the Census Bureau for data presentation purposes.   Census areas are defined in cooperation between the State of Alaska and the Census Bureau for statistical purposes.

From time to time, new boroughs have been organized and the census areas adjusted.  For example the Aleutians East Borough was organized from an area within the Aleutians Census Area.  The remnant of the census area was renamed to Aleutians West Census Area.

The boroughs are not exclusively more urban areas.  For example, the North Slope Borough has less than 7000 people, but is larger than all but 10 States.  About 60% of the population is in the Barrow area.

If you click on the various areas on the map linked above, you will see that some are designated as Borough, Municipality, or City and Borough; these are governmental units.  The others are designated as Census Area.

They have different names but aside from their local gov't structure, they seem the same as counties, since we're only using them as "county equivalents", like you said.

No, the Census Areas have no local gov't structure whatsoever. They are merely used as "county equivalents" by the US Census bureau, they have no other function.

[minionofmidas]

No, the Census Areas have no local gov't structure whatsoever. They are merely used as "county equivalents" by the US Census bureau, they have no other function.

And the census bureau just uses them for statistical pursposes - for collecting data.

Well, that's all the census bureau uses real counties for as well.