For those of you interested, I’ve been spending a considerable amount of time on the site – although the results of this effort are not yet visible. I’ve learned how to build web pages from a database and I’m in the process of migrating the site to be fully database-driven. This will produce a site that is more flexible with many more options to present information, hyper link new pages, compare results, and so forth. The maintenance is also much easier! 🙂
I’ve also been collecting more data/information and building more maps. Of course, the Election 2004 campaign has already begun and I plan to create candidate comparisons on issues (like what was available in 2000) and present the results of the primaries in addition to the 2004 general election.
Hope you received the Tennessee data I e-mailed you from 1868-1912. Please advise.
John was very helpful in submitting data for Tennessee. I have received all the spreadsheets from 1876 through 1960 (1940 excepted). In fact, the maps for 1916, 1948, 1952, and 1956 are on the site using the data from John. I made some corrections that showed up as sum/total mismatches (e.g. Rep1948 in Bledsoe county should be 1103 instead of 1130) by using the data published in the Tennessee Blue Book for the appropriate years. Prior to 1940, there are a number of discrepancies in the data (the sources seem to have a number of errors – sum does not equal total in many cases). At times, the data is off by thousands of votes. I would like to resolve these before presenting maps that may be incorrect.
Some of the data problems may be related to the direct election of Presidential Electors, in which case there are many different totals for each “candidate”. I’ll make another log entry adressing this issue.