New York State Township Map

[DavidNYC]

This is really tremendous. So Dave, does this mean you successfully got data from all 62 NY counties? (Well, I guess you get five at a go with the NYC BoE.) That's really impressive - I know from personal experience that it requires a lot of legwork and a decent amount of cash (since quite a few counties charge for their data).

[DavidNYC]

I'm curious to know how you actually obtained the data file from each county. Did you send letters? Emails? Make phone calls? Some combination of the above? And about how much time did it take? And did most counties charge you, or no?

The reason I ask is because we had to do this for about 120 counties nationwide for the presidential results by CD project, and it was a long, arduous and sometimes expensive project, so I'm wondering how your effort compared. It took myself and a colleague almost two months to collect all of them, and it involved a lot of emails (many unanswered), many phone calls (often more than one to the same BoEs), some formal snail mail FOI requests, and about $300 in out-of-pocket expenses for counties which charged for the data (something which drives me endlessly nuts). And it would have cost even more but for some successful wheedling with a few really outrageous counties.

We had to deal with a number of counties in NY. Most were easy to deal with, and a few charged us. The NYC BoE was pretty helpful but wouldn't release preliminary data to us for parts of Queens in which there was a pending state Senate recount, so we had to cool our heels. The worst was Nassau, which promised me a disk for ages, and then finally sent me a hardcopy canvass book.

Oh, and that's another thing. The quality of the data varied widely. Sometimes we got nice Excel files. Other times we got computer-generated PDFs. Other times we got scanned-in PDFs (ugh). And still others, we had things faxed to us (worst by far). We uploaded everything we got here:

http://www.scribd.com/group/70753-2008-precinct-level-election-results

[DavidNYC]

I noticed the files you uploaded to scribd - this is a good thing to share.  I have been considering including a feature on the atlas that builds a library of "primary source" documents (i.e. official reports - summary and precinct) linked in to each of the individual counties - could be uploaded by anyone.  Let me know whether you like this idea. (note that some counties actually over-write their data every election and therefore the original information is lost - no history!).  Would be nice to capture and record.

Dave, I can't tell you enough how great an idea this is. Indeed, as you suggest, it's almost vital, given how little care some counties give to storing their data. And I admit, I've often wished I could click on your "Source" descriptions at the bottom of many pages.

I think Scribd works really well for these purposes. It's easy to use, and also seems to be well-indexed by Google. I can understand if you'd want to keep the docs within the Atlas domain, of course - though one thing to consider is that you don't need to worry about bandwidth costs with Scribd. And the infrastructure is all there - folks could start uploading right away. (One nice feature: batch uploading.)

In any case, once again, would love to see you do this.