MIT Election Data and Science Laboratory

MIT Election Data and Science Laboratory
Name	MIT Election Data and Science Laboratory
Formation	2014
Type	Research laboratory
Headquarters	Cambridge, Massachusetts
Leader title	Director
Leader name	Professor Charles Stewart III
Parent organization	Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Contents

MIT Election Data and Science Laboratory is a research unit that compiles, curates, and analyzes election administration, voting, and returns data for scholars, journalists, and policymakers. The laboratory produces datasets, software, and reports used by researchers at institutions such as Harvard University, Princeton University, Stanford University, Yale University and by journalists at outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Its work interfaces with archival projects at the Library of Congress, legal analysis from the Supreme Court of the United States, and data standards promoted by organizations such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the United States Census Bureau.

Overview

The laboratory focuses on election returns, precinct geographies, and administration metrics and provides reproducible datasets suited to study phenomena from the Electoral College (United States) to state-level contests like those in California, Texas, Florida, New York (state), and Illinois (state). Staff and affiliates include political scientists, data scientists, and legal scholars with affiliations to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, University of Michigan, Duke University, and University of California, Berkeley. The group's outputs are cited in reports by the Brennan Center for Justice, the Pew Research Center, and testimony before state legislatures and the United States Congress.

Founded in 2014 within an institute that includes departments such as the Department of Political Science (MIT), the laboratory built on prior electoral data efforts including projects at Harvard Kennedy School and datasets from the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. Early work responded to disputed counts in contests involving figures like Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Donald Trump, and local races in battlegrounds such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan (state). Over time the lab expanded to include precinct-level digitization projects, partnerships with the National Archives and Records Administration, and collaborations with election administrators from states including Georgia (U.S. state), Arizona, and Wisconsin.

The laboratory conducts empirical studies on turnout, ballot design, and partisan outcomes with methods drawn from research traditions at Princeton University, University of Chicago, and London School of Economics. Major projects examine vote miscounts tied to cases like litigation after the 2000 United States presidential election, assess redistricting effects similar to analyses in Shelby County v. Holder debates, and quantify administrative disparities in counties such as Maricopa County, Arizona and Cook County, Illinois. Research outputs include working papers that engage with scholarship from scholars at Columbia Law School, Yale Law School, and policy analyses used by the Bipartisan Policy Center.

The laboratory maintains comprehensive datasets on state returns, precinct shapefiles, and candidate-level results used alongside geographic tools like ArcGIS, QGIS, and statistical software such as R (programming language), Python (programming language), and Stata. Collections incorporate historical returns comparable to archives at the National Archives, digitized registers like those held by the New York Public Library, and modern feeds similar to those used by FiveThirtyEight, The Cook Political Report, and Ballotpedia. The lab releases codebooks and APIs that interoperate with standards from the Open Data Institute and metadata schemas practiced at the Digital Public Library of America.

Methodological practice emphasizes reproducibility, transparency, and validation against official canvass documents from secretaries of state such as those in California Secretary of State, Florida Department of State, and Texas Secretary of State. The lab applies statistical techniques found in work by researchers at Northwestern University, University of California, Los Angeles, and Carnegie Mellon University for bias correction, error measurement, and geospatial interpolation. Documentation follows data management principles advocated by the Research Data Alliance and statistical reporting norms used in journals like the American Political Science Review and Journal of Politics.

The laboratory partners with academic centers including the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, the MIT Media Lab, and external entities such as the Brennan Center for Justice, the Center for Internet and Society (Stanford), and the National Science Foundation. Funders have included foundations active in civic technology funding such as the MacArthur Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The lab also works with state election offices, county boards like those in Maricopa County, Arizona and Hennepin County, Minnesota, and nonpartisan organizations including Common Cause.

The laboratory's datasets have informed analyses by journalists at Reuters, Associated Press, and Bloomberg News and have been cited in court filings brought in venues including the Supreme Court of the United States and state supreme courts such as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Academics from institutions like University of California, Berkeley, Duke University, and Stanford University have used the lab's data in studies on turnout, polarization, and electoral integrity. Reception in advocacy communities ranges from endorsements by groups like the Brennan Center for Justice to critical scrutiny in commentary by partisans aligned with Republican Party (United States) or Democratic Party (United States) actors in high-profile contests.