RAW US Election Data (In JSON Format)
Ok, so I'll start out by saying that I'm not happy with the results of the Wisconsin elections. So, "52%"… you suck.
After checking the election map at http://news.yahoo.com/page/2010electionsdashboard this morning, I decided to try to find a source of of the raw election numbers by county.
Apparently this is super top secret data. But after a little playing with yahoo's map, I got it to spit out the URLs it's using as the data source. These are in JSON format, so don't expect to be able to open up the file and just read it. I might work on a small script to search the files.
US Senate: http://d.yimg.com/b/api/data/us/news/elections/2010/result/us_senate.json
US Governor: http://d.yimg.com/b/api/data/us/news/elections/2010/result/governor.json
US House: http://d.yimg.com/b/api/data/us/news/elections/2010/result/us_house.json
[Update] How to get county data:
This took a bit more work. Each state has its own data file with the url in the format:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/elections/2010/results/11/02/[STATE_ABBR]_complete.json
Just replace [STATE_ABBR] with the abbreviation of the state you want data for.
For example, Wisconsin (WI) would be: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/elections/2010/results/11/02/wi_complete.json
JSON is relatively trivial to convert into XML if you're more comfortable working with XML. Here's an example javascript that converts JSON to XML.
Tags: election data, governor, house, json, json election data, raw election data, senate, us election, xml, xml election data
sparx said,
I'm planning on comparing the Wisconsin county data to the US Census data (http://www.census.gov/popest/counties/asrh/) to see the ratio of a county's voters to citizens over 18 years old. I've never seen a county by county breakdown of voter turnout… this way we can see which counties are the biggest losers.
November 3, 2010 @ 8:58 am
sparx said,
Aaaaannnnddd… I just realized the data in those files are State level. I'm trying to dig out the county level data source right now.
November 3, 2010 @ 9:16 am
sparx said,
I just added information to the post for getting the County level results for your State.
November 3, 2010 @ 10:01 am
spudart said,
can you make pretty charts and maps?
November 3, 2010 @ 10:03 am
sparx said,
There's already a pretty map linked in the post.
November 3, 2010 @ 10:23 am
unlikelymoose said,
power to the sparx! it will be really interesting to see which counties have the sleepyhead morons who think voting doesn't do anything worth while.
November 3, 2010 @ 3:00 pm
sparx said,
So.. I wrote my script and ran it against Wisconsin. I'll post the results tomorrow (if I remember).
The lowest voter turnout was Menominee County with about 25% of their eligible citizens (18+ years old) voting. They're a very small county apparently – with about 4,000 citizens, about 3,000 of which are over 18, and only about 750 voted. (about, about, about… I'm too lazy to pull up the exact numbers again)
November 3, 2010 @ 3:09 pm
Rob said,
Sparx,
Thanks for your work on this and sharing insights from your skills. I'm working on my own county data effort and look forward to seeing the script or the results.
Regards
Rob
November 4, 2010 @ 3:10 pm