There is a proposal by US Representative Rush Holt, D-NJ, which would
substantially fix this problem of lack of public access to detailed election
results:

The Poll Tape Transparency Act (HR 5228 in the 111th Congress)

Representative Holt will be submitting this same bill again in the 112th
Congress and his office may appreciate suggestions for the bill currently.

The fact that the public is denied convenient, timely access to detailed
election results presents other problems as well as those mentioned by
Charles.  There is virtually no public oversight, in most states, over
mail-in ballot handling or ballot security. This means publicly reporting
only aggregate jurisdiction or polling place totals allows several types of
vote manipulation or vote miscount to be undetectable. For instance, votes
may be padded (via ballot substitution or ballot box stuffing) in one type
of ballot, say absentee, for one candidate, while votes are simultaneously
subtracted (neglected to be counted) in another type of ballot, say polling
place voting.  We've seen evidence of this in several states whenever the
detailed data can be obtained, when whistleblowers come forward, or when
post-election forensic analysis is done of polling place records in states
that llow this or where attorneys are assisting election integrity
researchers.  Also, because there is a natural undervote rate, even if the
total number of voters is reconciled with the total number of ballots cast
county-wide (reconciliation is done only in polling places in most
jurisdictions), as long as the number of votes padded for one candidate does
not exceed the number of undervotes, then the aggregate numbers hides any
evidence of both problems - the undervote rate and the vote padding.  A
third vote manipulation that aggregating the election results covers up is
if votes are electronically switched in one ballot type, say polling
location, but not the other, say absentee voting.

Thus, this type of legislation requiring the public posting of polling place
results on the web (and at the polls) is very much needed, since most states
today do not conduct any publicly verifiable post-election audits that would
detect outcome-altering vote miscount in close elections. Detailed data
reporting would atleast reveal anomalous patterns consistent with miscount.
This is particularly important when we still have hopelessly hackable and
error-prone voting systems in use in most states, and completely inauditable
voting systems in many states.  (See Argonne security experts calls voting
systems insecure - Computerworld Blogs
http://blogs.computerworld.com/17633/argonne_security_experts_calls_voting_systems_insecure
)<http://blogs.computerworld.com/17633/argonne_security_experts_calls_voting_systems_insecure>

Until this problem of data inavailability is fixed, we have no reliable
evidence in most states to claim that official election results are
accurate, and we cannot be certain that any analysis based on official
results is valid.

For instance, New York State the election officials do not publicly post the
machine tallies from which county election officials randomly select to
audit. This violates the most fundamental rule of auditing data in any field
- commit the data first. Therefore any unpublished, unaudited machine
tallies can be manipulated to match any fraudulent overall result.  In
addition, New York State does not audit or allow the general public any
oversight over the processing of any of its absentee ballots, nor does any
NY county, to my knowledge, publicly post any unaggregated vote tallies by
ballot type and by polling place or precinct (called districts in NY).

It is a sad situation when it takes so much time, effort and money to try
obtain the data that needs to be routinely released *prior* to certification
if the public is to be able to verify the integrity of public elections.

Another good source of official election data for a fee is Kim Brace too of
EDS. I'm not sure if he has any more data than David Leip.  New Mexico does
the best job of any state currently in reporting its detailed election data.

Best regards,

Kathy

On Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 9:57 AM, Charles Stewart III <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> 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
>
> ===============================================================
> Charles Stewart III
> Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science
> Housemaster of McCormick Hall
>
> Voice:  617.253.3127 / Facsimile:  617.258.8546
> e-mail:  [log in to unmask] / URL:  http://web.mit.edu/cstewart/www/
>
> Department of Political Science
> 30 Wadsworth Street
> Building E53-449
> Cambridge, Massachusetts   02139
>
>
>
Kathy Dopp
http://electionmathematics.org
Town of Colonie, NY 12304
"One of the best ways to keep any conversation civil is to support the
discussion with true facts."

Fundamentals of Verifiable Elections
http://kathydopp.com/wordpress/?p=174

Realities Mar Instant Runoff Voting
http://electionmathematics.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantRunoffVotingFlaws.pdf

View some of my research on my SSRN Author page:
http://ssrn.com/author=1451051

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