A preliminary version of the 2008 County and New England Township data file is available on the store page. This file will be updated in the coming days/weeks as the data from the many states become official. The 2008 Senate and Gubernatorial files will also be available soon. As always, purchases of preliminary data are eligible for free updates.

I have updated corrected write-in figures for the state of New Hampshire in the General Election of 2004 for Presidential Candidates: Michael Badnarik, Michael Peroutka, and “Write-ins” (i.e. other write-ins) at the city/town and precinct level. Upon compiling the precinct-level data several weeks ago, I noticed that the data for individual write-in candidates posted on their web site under “Individual write-ins” did not reconcile with the total scattering vote at the precinct level (the figures did correlate at the county level). I emailed the New Hampshire Secretary of State Elections Division to ask about the discrepancy. Today, I received the following (very interesting) reply:

I received your email about the discrepancies in the write in votes for president. After having 3 different people work on these numbers, I decided to do it myself. Yes there were discrepancies. I went through each and every town and made corrections. I hope to have those corrections posted on our website in a couple of days. (maybe today..can’t promise) Thank you for calling this to my attention.

The new figures have been updated on the Atlas.

I have updated the 2000 Spreadsheet. The file is located on the store download page. If you have already purchased a copy, you may download and uncompress the update using the same password as was emailed to you after your purchase. The updates include:

• Alabama: Data for Barbour county changes significantly per updated data on Alabama Secretary of State web site
• Colorado: Bush in Phillips county changes from 1576 to 1573 per CO Official Abstract
• Mississippi: Data for Grenada county changes significantly per MS Official and Statistical Register
• Ohio: Data for Cuyahoga county changes marginally per Ohio Election Statistics
• Updates to the Data Sources sheet

Note that these changes are already reflected in the on-line data files.

I have completed the massive data spreadsheet for the 1988 general election and have made it available through the store. The price is a little higher than the others due to the large amount of effort required to research and enter the data.

One of the new topics in the forum this week included a request to view data for the 2000 Vote for President by city. Although I don’t have data for all the cities listed in the post, I have created a list of selected cities where I have data (these include states with official county subdivisions and precinct-level data that I have obtained). The list may be found here: http://www.uselectionatlas.org/USPRESIDENT/GENERAL/PE2000/pe2000cities.html

This list is not yet linked in from the main pages yet. If you know of additional data available for a city not listed, please let me know.

No, I’m not referring to the Florida recount of 2000 or even 1876. In this post, I’m discussing a challenge faced by any person attempting to present results of older Presidential Elections. The problem has its root cause in the U.S. Constitution - a small excerpt from Article II, Section I reads: Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, …. It turns out, that most states, for a long period of time, chose to appoint Presidential Electors through a method direct popular vote of the Electors themselves. As an example, the residents of the State of Ohio, in 1904, had to cast votes for 23 names among 138 Presidential Electors. The names of the actual Presidential Candidates to whom the long list of Electors are pledged, were not on the ballot.

Given such an unwieldy voting task, the totals amongst the electors of the same party often varies. In our Ohio example from 1904, the 23 Republican Electors’ totals vary by over 3,000 votes. In several cases, including MD 1908, CA 1912, and WV 1916, the closeness of the election combined with the variation in totals for the electors resulted in a split ticket of chosen Presidential Electors!

This variation in Electors is due to many factors, including errors, the desire for some voters to vote for the actual electors that they know, a lack of understanding of the voting procedure, and even the choice of an elector with the same name as another party’s Presidential Candidate such as ‘Alfred E. Smith’ , a Socialist Elector from Colorado in 1928 - he received about 1,000 more votes than any other Socialist Elector.

With all these votes recorded by the various election agencies of the time, many publications created by these agencies summarize the results - inconsistently from state to state and even within a single state from year to year. Examples of summaries include: data shown for the elector whom received the most total votes, data shown for a “generalized average” of electors, data “given is that cast for the elector receiving the highest aggregate vote cast in each county for elector by the party represented”… and so forth. When compiling all of these together - especially for a close election - the result is a “total popular vote” that is not statistically correct. Did Kennedy really win the popular vote in 1960? How about the split result in Popular/Electoral vote of 1888?

I am attempting to collect the data for all Electors in all the states for these years, so that the results may be presented consistantly (and perhaps even variably (meaning that I might be able to have an option to show the “total popular vote” by different statistical methods such as average, highest total elector, median elector, total of highest aggregate elector in each county, total of median electors in each county, etc.)) This is a big job, so don’t expect it too soon.

Comments Welcome.