Each state of the United States has an official website with election results, both for the current election and for historical elections; they are listed here. Many counties also have their own official election results pages, which are not listed here.
It is rare for a state to have a complete run of historical election records online; many of the official documents are only available in paper format, especially for years prior to 1990. Previous studies of election results data have noted that official records at the county level have been routinely archived, forgotten, or discarded.[1]
Official results may be in PDF, Excel, CSV, HTML, Election Markup Language, or plain text formats, and may be scans of the original paper documents. Not everything here is easily machine readable for further processing. There are a number of sources for this data where the original source documents have been keyed in and checked and turned into machine readable databases.[2]
A second table below illustrates with some examples of formats.
Data formats
editThis table shows the variety of formats encountered when looking at election data. It aims, at the minimum, to show the easiest to process and the hardest to process examples from an election in each state.
| State | Election | Data URL | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alabama | 1992 General Election results, County level | [1] | Excel |
| 2010 Certified General Election Results, complete with write-in appendix | [2] | PDF; parts scanned with hand written corrections | |
| Alaska | 1960 General Election | [3] | PDF, scanned from typewritten manuscript |
| 2008 General Election | [4] | HTML, "GEMS Election Results" format [5] | |
| Arizona | 1974 General Election Canvass | [6] | PDF, scanned from nth generation copy, italic font |
| 2010 General Election, unofficial results | [7] | Web-based reporting system from Clarity; detail reports in XML, TXT, Excel | |
| Arkansas | 1976 Election Results | [8] | PDF, scanned, some pages upside down |
| 2006 Election Results Publication | [9] | Excel | |
| California | 1990 Statement of the Vote | [10] | PDF, scanned, fonts uneven/broken |
| 2010 Statement of the Vote | [11] | PDF from digital original | |
| 2012 election results for news media | Election Markup Language format [9] | ||
| Colorado | 2010 Abstract of Votes Cast | [12] | PDF from digital original |
| Utah | 2010 General Election | [13] | Excel |
References
edit- ^ The Record of American Democracy, 1984–1990, Gary King; Bradley Palmquist; Greg Adams; Micah Altman; Kenneth Benoit; Claudine Gay; Jeffrey B. Lewis; Russ Mayer; and Eric Reinhardt. 1997. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA [producer], Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR [distributor].
- ^ US Election Atlas, e.g.
- ^ "Federal Elections", Federal Election Commission; published every 2 years since 1982.
- ^ Historical Election Results, Secretary of State of Alabama
- ^ "Inventory of the Elections Division", California State Archives. Paper records only
- ^ Voting Statistics, Elections of 1940–1952 incl.
- ^ "Election Results", District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethics
- ^ Michigan Manual, 1906, pg. 392 and following
- ^ Election Night Data Feed guide, version 6.0, California Secretary of State