At the risk of seeming like an old grump, could I step back and fret a bit about data quality that this thread has left by the side of the road?
Election return data at the local is surprisingly difficult to acquire, even in this electronic age. It requires a certain persistence that has to be learned and trained. Learning to be persistent is difficult in these days when we teach our students that if they know how to ask, there's already an Excel spreadsheet available with the data they need.
In the United States, all local jurisdictions must eventually report their canvassed returns to the state election officer, which then publishes them. All states publish returns at the level of reporting, usually the county. Most of these reports are on the web, in a variety of formats, which now can easily (if tediously) be manipulated with software that is now essentially free --- by which I mean Excel and Adobe's pdf reader. I know this from personal experience, constructing datasets of turnout and vote totals for presidential elections at the county and town level each year since 2000. While I have purchased some software to speed up the process, like able2extract and ocr programs, it's still the case that every format I've seen from a state can be manipulated with one of these programs, with a little hand-entry thrown in from time-to-time.
We have a great debt to pay to news organizations and web sites that gather this data for us and post it up on their sites for our use. In the days immediately following elections, these sites --- NY Times, CNN, etc, --- are often the only practical sources for scholars to use, if they want to be involved in the evolving story about the election. (In other words, if you want to talk to reporters or wrote blogs, you often need to use these sites.) These sites are often just mirroring the AP operation, which is an extraordinary operation. HOWEVER, AP is not a scholarly operation. That's where my concern lies.
States take a long time to certify their election returns and release the final results, accounted for at the local level --- sometimes taking months to do so. (In 2008, for instance, Massachusetts did not make available its town-level returns, even if you asked really nice, until April 2009.) AP will eventually mop up their data set, so that it reflects these certified returns. However, I strongly suspect that the abandoned datasets sitting around on the CNN and NYT web sites are not updated, and so reflect all sorts of omissions, such as provisional and absentee ballots in many states.
As an example, compare the results at the NYT site for California (http://elections.nytimes.com/2010/results/california) with the California statement of vote (http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/sov/2010-general/complete-sov.pdf). The New York Times data is missing 1.6 million votes, or roughly 16% of the votes cast for senator. That's because the NYT data ceased to be updated as California completed its count.
I think it is generally a very bad idea to encourage graduate students to purchase datasets like this, or to rely on news web sites, but if there is one web site that bears watching, it's Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, since the data are usually based on official returns and, if you dig deeply enough, he reports his data sources. I've purchased data from his site, have cross-checked it with my own efforts, and found it very good.
In conclusion, I hope we can make a distinction between the fast-and-dirty analysis we do on the fly, because we're trying to make sense of unfolding election counts or trying to gin-up an example for class, and the scholarly analysis we do. If the former, then the newspaper web sites are fine, and even indispensible. If the latter, we have a duty to be careful about provenance.
Charles
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Charles Stewart III
Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science
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-----Original Message-----
From: Political Methodology Society [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of John Henderson
Sent: Friday, January 07, 2011 7:34 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [POLMETH] 2010 Senate Elections results
I don't believe so. Here's the full API list:
http://developer.nytimes.com/docs
On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 10:31 AM, Simon Jackman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Are these data part of what NYTimes exposes via it's API?
>
> Simon Jackman
> Dept of Political Science and, by courtesy, Statistics,
> Stanford University, Stanford CA 94305-6044
> http://jackman.Stanford.edu
>
> On Jan 7, 2011, at 8:41 AM, John Henderson <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
> > For a licensing fee, you can purchase the county data here:
> > http://www.uselectionatlas.org/BOTTOM/store_data.php.
> >
> > For free, you can access county data on the nytimes webpage, but you'll
> have
> > to enter the data by hand using their graphical interface:
> > http://elections.nytimes.com/2010/results/senate. Maybe you could get
> the
> > data from the nytimes via email however?
> >
> > Best,
> > John
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 1:20 AM, Inaki Sagarzazu <
> > [log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> I was trying to find the county level results for the 2010 senate
> elections
> >> and it has proven a little difficult. Does anybody have any suggestions
> as
> >> to where can these results be found?
> >>
> >> Thanks in advance
> >>
> >> Iņaki
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >> Iņaki Sagarzazu
> >> Research Officer
> >> Nuffield College
> >> University of Oxford
> >> OX1 1NF Oxford
> >> United Kingdom
> >>
> >> Office: 44 (0) 1 865 614990
> >> [log in to unmask]<mailto:
> [log in to unmask]
> >>>
> >> http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/sagarzazu/index.html
> >>
> >>
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