United States Elections Project

United States Elections Project
Name	United States Elections Project
Formation	2004
Founder	Michael P. McDonald
Type	Academic project
Headquarters	University of Florida

United States Elections Project

The United States Elections Project is an academic data initiative that tracks voter turnout and election administration metrics for federal, state, and local contests in the United States. Founded by a political scientist affiliated with the University of Florida, the project aggregates official and unofficial data to support researchers, journalists, and policymakers analyzing trends in presidential elections, midterm elections, and primary elections.

Overview

The project provides regularly updated compilations of early voting totals, absentee ballot statistics, and certified turnout figures for contests such as the United States presidential election, United States House of Representatives elections, and United States Senate elections. It synthesizes information from state-level agencies including secretary of state offices, county election boards, and state legislatures to produce standardized datasets. Users include scholars from institutions like Harvard University, Stanford University, Princeton University, journalists at outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and analysts at organizations like the Brennan Center for Justice.

History and Development

Established in the early 2000s by Michael P. McDonald while at the University of California, San Diego and later affiliated with the University of Florida, the project emerged amid heightened scholarly emphasis on turnout after the controversial 2000 United States presidential election and reforms following the Help America Vote Act of 2002. Early work built on methodologies used in studies by researchers at Pew Research Center, American National Election Studies, and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. Over successive cycles, the project expanded coverage for special elections like the 2010 United States House of Representatives elections and high-profile state contests such as the 2008 United States presidential election in Florida.

Methodology and Data Collection

The project's methodology combines manual collection of official counts from state secretaries of state and county boards of elections with cross-checks against media reports from outlets including Associated Press, Reuters, and USA Today. It standardizes disparate reporting formats used by jurisdictions such as California, Texas, Florida, and New York to produce comparable measures of ballots cast, registered voters, and turnout percentages. The project documents procedures for handling provisional ballots, same-day registration data where applicable, and variations introduced by laws such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and state-level voting statutes. Researchers using the data often combine it with survey sources like the Current Population Survey and datasets from the National Election Pool for validation.

Major Projects and Publications

Major outputs include comprehensive daily and final turnout tallies for each federal election cycle, special reports on early voting patterns in states like Ohio, Georgia, and Arizona, and methodological notes published by academic outlets and cited in policy analyses from groups such as the Bipartisan Policy Center and Brookings Institution. The project’s datasets have supported peer-reviewed articles in journals connected with American Political Science Association members and have been used in books on electoral behavior referencing cases like the 2016 United States presidential election and the 2020 United States presidential election. The project also compiles historical turnout series that intersect with archival collections at institutions like the Library of Congress and the National Archives and Records Administration.

Impact and Reception

Scholars and journalists credit the project with improving transparency around turnout reporting in the wake of high-turnout cycles such as 2008 United States presidential election and 2020 United States presidential election. Its figures are frequently cited by commentators at NPR, analysts at the Pew Charitable Trusts, and election administrators in states including Pennsylvania and Michigan. Policymakers and courts have referenced turnout analyses in litigation following contested contests like the 2000 United States presidential election controversy and post-2020 disputes, and the project’s data inform comparative studies involving democracies such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.

Criticisms and Limitations

Critics note limitations inherent in compiling decentralized election returns across 50 states and thousands of counties, pointing to data lags and inconsistencies similar to those identified by auditors at state departments of elections and watchdogs like the United States Election Assistance Commission. Methodological issues arise when reconciling provisional ballot treatment across jurisdictions, differences in registration systems in states like North Dakota versus California, and variations in reporting formats employed by counties such as Los Angeles County and Cook County. Some scholars argue the project’s reliance on official administrative counts can obscure disenfranchisement patterns highlighted in litigation under statutes like the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Others call for greater metadata on data provenance and machine-readable releases to match standards used by repositories like the Harvard Dataverse and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.

Category:Election data