more votes in a VTD than population

[milandv]

In New Mexico, there are voting districts that have more votes than voting population (or than total population). This holds when joining back to the race-specific file. Some examples below where adrv_18 is the sum of the average democratic and average republican votes and sen_18 is the number of votes counted in the 2018 Senate race in New Mexico.

Should this be possible?

# A tibble: 52 × 7
       GEOID20   pop   vap adv_18 arv_18 adrv_18 sen_18
         <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>  <dbl>  <dbl>   <dbl>  <dbl>
 1 35027000028   178   151   187    440.    627.   465.
 2 35001000567   197   151   244.   202.    446.   330.
 3 35001000368   421   339   476.   351.    827.   615.
 4 35049000123   413   396   822.   138.    960.   698.
 5 35051000009   153   123   146.   142.    288.   214.
 6 35001000380   491   387   458.   373.    831.   625.
 7 35049000078   835   693  1248    269.   1517.  1097.
 8 35049000120   554   495   847.   168.   1016.   735.
 9 35001000537   514   436   523    348.    871.   645.
10 35049000122   480   437   728.   114.    842    607 
# … with 42 more rows

[christopherkenny]

So this does happen for sure. It's a bit annoying, but this requires estimation across geographies to do the following:
(1) estimate votes from 2010 precincts down to 2010 blocks. We use 2010 Census block population to proportionally allocate votes.
(2) crosswalk from 2010 blocks to 2020 blocks. We rely on the VEST crosswalk, which implements some of Brian Amos and Michael McDonald's cool work to improve over the basic area estimation approach that the Census Bureau puts out.

Additionally, each vote and person recorded is a snapshot in time, which may not align if there are major trends, especially if the trends result from things like apartment buildings which could impact the design of blocks or precincts.

[rootsmusic]

Is this issue limited to split blocks where votes were allocated? Or is it happening to blocks that doesn't need to be split?