Announcing the New UF Election Lab!

I am pleased to announce the launch of a new website for the UF Election Lab!

The new Election Lab is composed of a multi-disciplinary group of scholars at the University of Florida with interests in elections. Our affiliated members are in the fields of political science, computer science, and journalism. Our mission is to educate the public and our students, many of whom have advanced into careers within the election space.

I’ve been busy over the past several months updating datasets and moving them to the new UF Election Lab archive and teaching myself JavaScript so I provide data visualizations on the new site. I appreciate your patience while this transition has been taking place. I hope you find it will be worth the wait. There are many new features and improvements coming your way with the voter turnout data from the United States Elections Project, the precinct data from the Voting and Election Science Team, and a new project collecting local election data.

United States Elections Project

The site is built around a new data archive, which I now use to disseminate turnout rates I disseminated previously on the United States Elections Project. The new data archive will provide better versioning for when I update turnout rate statistics, particularly the voting-eligible population denominators.

The new site has improved data visualizations, such as this national turnout rate chart to assist the many teachers who present this information in their classes.

I intend to move my popular early voting statistics and visualizations to the new platform, too, so stayed tuned!

VEST Data

The Voting and Election Science Team (or VEST) precinct data will be disseminated through the new data archive. We appreciate the Harvard Dataverse as a valuable dissemination platform for VEST data, but we discovered people mistakenly believe Harvard produces the data we distribute there. The new data archive will better signify our work as our own and provide a better guided search for visitors to discover our data. The data archive also provides better versioning so we can be more transparent about when and how we update our data. We require archive users to create accounts, so we can communicate better with our users about new data releases and updates.

VEST data has had over 180,000 downloads. We have a strong commitment to open data access and we are proud of the many uses our freely available precinct data have been put to. New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Virginia adopted our data for their redistricting. Alabama plaintiffs employed our data in their successful challenge of Alabama’s congressional districts as a racial gerrymander, as well as many other federal and state court cases successfully challenging districts as racial or partisan gerrymanders. Media use our data for their elections coverage, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Associated Press, and others. Advocacy ventures such as Dave’s Redistricting App and PlanScore incorporate our data. Scholars analyze our data in their research. And we can’t forget the vibrant community of political mappers.

Despite these many successes, we’ve encountered individuals and organizations who unscrupulously pass off VEST data as their own. In one case, a team of researchers at a university charged a state government half a million dollars to download and forward our data for the state’s redistricting. A team at another school buried the required attribution to our work as a footnote in a lengthy data methodology appendix, while they raised considerable money from private funders for their project which was highly dependent on our data. We consulted with lawyers, but these activities were not violations of our attribution-only license.

We are therefore changing how we disseminate VEST data. Our generous funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation expired, which provided support to create the 2016, 2018, and 2020 open-source VEST precinct data. We continue our work in an uncertain environment. We are compiling 2022 precinct data, which should be completed in early 2024. But, we have to face reality we need to recover our costs. For this reason, we are gating access to 2022 and thereafter releases to paying subscribers. We hope that paying commercial clients will allow us to continue our work and provide free or discounted access to individuals or groups with limited resources. Gating access to subscribers — even if free — also allows us to cut off the few individuals or organizations that act unethically.

Local Election Data

One of our current projects is to investigate collecting and disseminating local election data. This project is funded by the Houston Endowment, who is particularly interested in local election data in the seven counties that comprise the Houston Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). Where we can, we are collecting election results, lists of registered voters eligible to participate in the local elections, lists of the people who voted, and reports of who voted and the method they voted by. This is particularly challenging for local governments that span multiple counties, such as some Texas Independent School Districts. We hope to expand data collection to other MSAs in Texas and elsewhere. We expect to complete this data collection by mid-2024, when will be begin disseminating data and visualizations on the UF Election Lab website.

Rethinking Substack

I want to provide more content to you. More visualizations. More analyses. To that end, I am investigating how we can pipe Substack subscriptions into our charitable University of Florida Foundation Account, which is used solely for election research and student education opportunities. (You are welcome to give now, if you’d like!) We have a team of eager and capable students who are already producing content on social media and Wikipedia. If we can figure out how to make this work, we can feature their content on Substack, and you will know you are helping them with their education and future careers. I hope to add them soon so you can access their posts as well as mine. We have access to our own 2022 data, and will provide exclusive analyses and visualizations for the upcoming 2023 elections and beyond. More exciting posts will be coming!