The goal of OpenElections is to create the first free, comprehensive, standardized, linked set of election data for the United States, including federal, statewide and state legislative offices. The current options for election data can be difficult to find and use or financially out-of-reach for most journalists and civic hackers. We want the people who work with election data to be able to get what they need, whether that's for stories and data analysis or web applications and interactive graphics.
OpenElections is a volunteer project, which means you can help us collect and convert official precinct results data. It was co-founded by Serdar Tumgoren and Derek Willis in 2012 and is managed by Willis, a lecturer in data journalism at the University of Maryland. OpenElections gratefully accepts donations online (use this form, putting "OpenElections" in the line for specific fund) and funding goes directly towards acquiring and converting official election results into data. OpenElections data has been used by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, several academic projects and other organizations. The data is and will remain free to anyone.
In general, our repositories are divided into two main categories: sources and data. All repositories that contain the word sources have original official election results files obtained from state and local election authorities and represent a variety of formats: PDFs, spreadsheets, text files and more. Repositories that have data in their names contain converted official data that has been standardized in certain ways (offices and parties in particular). The data comes in CSV files that can be opened in any spreadsheet or database program or read by any programming language. Not all states have a sources repository - some states produce a single statewide precinct-level data file - but all states have a data repository. Inside both kinds of repositories there are folders that represent years.
We use GitHub Issues to track progress in obtaining and converting official election results, and for any potential mistakes or omissions in the converted data. Your participation in that process is welcomed!
This GitHub organization also contains other repositories with utilities we've developed in our work and for other election-related information we've obtained. Although many of the tools we've developed are written in Python, we accept code contributions in any modern language.
