The Atlas Server was replaced today with a new motherboard, faster processor, and more memory. Enjoy the improved performance!

Election data and maps from the 2006 General Election for U.S. Senate and Governor for most states have been uploaded to the site. A few states remain to release their official data, including my home state of Massachusetts. The expectation is for these data to be available within the next couple of weeks. The detailed county and town-level spreadsheets have also been updated with the most recently-available information.

Preliminary, unofficial election results (data and maps) for the 2006 Senate and Governor’s races are on-line. These data will be updated as election agencies across the country finalize and post official tallies. A final official compilation of data for all states is expected in early January. Population data for 2006 will be added when these data are released by the Census Bureau. Preliminary detailed spreadsheet files for these contests are available at the store. As always, once purchased, updates to spreadsheets are free.

Today is election day. If you are reading this, you are most likely an election enthusiast and will likely vote - but in the off chance that you are considering not voting, here is my encouragement to do so. Exercise your right to choose the people who govern us. Don’t like the candidates running? write someone in. Turned off by the negativity and lack of civil debate? No one will ever know if you stay home. Most states have several choices on the ballot - Politics1 highlights many of the candidates running for state and federal offices.

I cast my ballot this morning - a fill-in-the-oval paper ballot to be read by an optical scanner. This is a fast, relatively accurate system with full independent audit capability. Here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, there are unfortunately not a lot of contested races - my Representative in Congress in the 4th district, Barney Frank (D), is unopposed. The Senate race (Edward Kennedy (D)) has not been competitive, Secretary of State, Treasurer, and Auditor have no Republican challenger (they do however, have either Green-Rainbow or Working Families party challengers). The Governor’s race has been, by far, the most interesting and productive public debate (although the campaign was too negative in my opinion). There are three interesting ballot initiatives, however, and I cast my support for Question 2, allowing candidates to run on multiple ballot lines, more commonly referred to as fusion.

The Atlas will be posting updates throughout the evening for Senatorial and Gubernatorial races across the nation.

Several members of the Atlas community have suggested providing a feature for members to share their endorsements of candidates for the 2006 Senatorial and Gubernatorial contests. This feature has now been added to the Atlas (Links: Gubernatorial Endorsements and Senatorial Endorsements). A compiled map on the endorsements home page shows the aggregate of community endorsements. The new scripts include pages to show state-by-state listing of endorsement totals for each candidate.

The unofficial results are in from the competitive 2006 Republican Primary for Seante in Rhode Island. In this race, incumbent Senator Lincoln Chafee was challenged by Cranston Mayor Steve Laffey. The unofficial result published by the Rhode Island Board of Elections is: Chafee (i) 34,407 (54.22%); Laffey 29,052 (45.78%), a margin of about 8 percentage points.

The township map reveals the strength of each candidate. Laffey performed best in the North (Providence County) outside the city. His best municipality is the town of Johnston where he won 62.8% of the vote. In his home-town city of Cranston, he received his largest vote margin of 447 votes, capturing 52.5% of the vote. Chafee had his strength in the city of Providence and the south of the state (Bristol, Newport and Washington Counties). His best municipaility is the town of New Shoreham (Block Island) where he received 78.3% of the vote. Chafee received his largest vote margin in the City of Warwick - 2,134 votes where he won 62.3% to 37.6%.

An interesting statistic with regard to the lack of Republican Strength in Rhode Island - in the City of Providence (2000 Voting-Age Population of 128,341 - almost twice as many people as in Warwick, the second largest city): the total number of votes cast in the Republican primary was 2,941 votes, 1/5th the 14,861 votes cast in a far-less-competitive Democratic Primary.

The section of the Atlas that includes primary returns for US President have been updated to include official results from Presidential Primaries in the 2004 Democratic contest (county maps, congressional district maps, and data). All caucus events and several primary events were run by the Democratic party and therefore these results are obtained from the respective state Democratic Party organizations (and not from official state election agencies). In some cases, these data are incomplete due to the inability to obtain final and complete data from the state parties. A complete spreadsheet of the data is available for purchase from the store page.

The preliminary results of the 2006 Connecticut Senatorial Primary between incumbent Democrat Joseph Lieberman and challenger Ned Lamont are in. With 99.6% of the precincts having reported, Lamont defeats Lieberman 146,065 to 136,150 (51.8% to 48.2%). This is a more narrow margin than the more recent polls by Rasmussen and Quinnipiac University had predicted.
The preliminary town results map (shown at right) shows the relative strenghts of each of the two Democratic candidates. Much of the state was relatively evenly split. Lieberman was strongest in the route 8 corridor - West Haven, Derby, Ansonia up through Naugatuck, Waterbury and Thomaston. Lamont’s strength was centered in the northwestern portion of the state (Litchfield County - with his strongest town Cornwall), the south near Lyme, the northeast near Mansfield, and Lamon’t hometown, Greenwich.

The site has recently added state-level (and some county-level) data for the Presidential Elections of 1876, 1880, 1884, and 1888 to the database. The total figures for some states have changed slightly from the original html files due to differing figures between the primary sources referenced and the source used to create the original html tables (see What was the Real Popular Vote? entry for some additional information with regard to why popular vote figures for older elections are so variable.). Work continues to add data from older elections (state-level data, county-level data, county-boundary accuracy and image-mapping, etc.).

Two new sections are now available on the Atlas - Gubernatorial Election Polls for 2006 and Senatorial Election Polls for 2006. The new polling sections include the ability to view individual polls in detail as well as summary pages comparing recent polls by state and by polling agency. The main page includes a compilation of the most recent three polls for each state and presents a map of the result showing the current status of who is ahead on a per-state basis as well as a table showing the current view of the pick-ups for each part. Also included is a trend graph illustrating the number of states ahead for each party starting in February of 2006.