This release adds precinct-level returns from Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Utah.
We've added identifiers for candidates in U.S. House and Senate races. FEC
IDs are present for nearly all candidates. A
comprehensive set of identifiers from the @unitedstates
project is available for
incumbents and winners (GovTrack, ICPSR, MapLight, Open Secrets, WikiData, and
Google Knowledge Graph entity IDs). Further details are in the codebook, which
now gives the source of variables. Our approach was to join the datasets on
office, state, district, and a normalizing transformation of candidate,
which remains in the data as candidate_normalized. (This is a single word from
candidate, usually the last name, in lowercase.) There are two new files in
the release. We're providing the returns in Feather
format as well as CSV, and including a
supplementary table of variable-value frequencies.
This release adds returns from ten new states; geographic identifiers; and improvements from ongoing work on data quality. The new returns are from Alabama, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Virginia, and Wisconsin. This brings coverage to 19 states and the District of Columbia.
County-level geographic variables are now available as county_name,
county_fips, county_ansi, county_lat, and county_long. We added these
variables by merging in jurisdiction FIPS codes from the 2016 Election
Administration and Voting
Survey
(EAVS) by jurisdiction name, and then joining the returns by FIPS code with
the Census Bureau's [2017 gazetteer files](https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-
data/data/gazetteer2017.html). In states where the administrative jurisdiction
is the county (or equivalent), jurisdiction and county_name are roughly the
same but differ in source: jurisdiction is from the returns as released by the
county, and county_name is from the gazetteer. Where local governments
administer elections, the new geographic variables describe the county that
contains the jurisdiction. They are not yet available for Alaska.
We continue to normalize the data across states and jurisdictions. Expect
changes throughout the data, but particularly for down-ballot races, in
candidate, office, district, mode, writein, and party.
This initial release covers ten jurisdictions: Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Idaho, Louisiana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Tennessee, and Wyoming. Returns for the remaining states are forthcoming.