Crowdsourcing Pres-by-CD: 100 Counties for the Last 100 Districts

Thanks to the heroic efforts of this community, we were able to post a third wave of presidential results by Congressional district yesterday. And as you can see from our perma-post, we now have numbers for an impressive 332 districts. That leaves us with just over 100 districts to go, and as you’d expect, these are some of the thorniest.

The real problem is access to data. Most of the more recently-posted numbers have been drawn from precinct-level data. This sort of information is usually only available at the county level, rather than from Secretaries of State. Many counties make this data easily accessible on the web (some in more usable forms than others), but some don’t offer it online at all – and those are the counties we need to tackle. Some offer it, but charge for it. And some don’t even appear to have websites.

The bottom line is that there are about 100 counties whose precinct-level data we need in order to finish this project – and we’re only gonna solve this problem by throwing as much manpower (or dare I say, people power?) at it as possible. To that end, we’ve created another crowdsourcing spreadsheet for folks to start tackling this.

The first order of business is finding out contact information for the county Boards of Election. Many won’t have email addresses, and even for those that do, emails may go unanswered. So that means we’re going to have to start making phone calls. I can’t stress this enough: Please be super-polite when making these calls. These are hardworking folks who ensure our elections are run properly and probably don’t do this for much money.

Anyhow, if you do call up a county BoE and request the data, please put the date of your request & your name (username is fine) in column E. This will help us avoid inundating the BoEs with multiple requests. Some might be able to email you the data, in which case you can just directly upload it. (For spreadsheets, please upload them to Google Docs. For PDFs, please use Scribd – PDFs on Google Docs can’t be shared. Spreadsheets which exceed Google’s 1MB limit can also be uploaded to Scribd.) When you do, please put the URL in the right-most column.

Some counties might insist on mailing you a disk. It’s even possible that some will only want to send you a hard copy. If this turns out to be the case and you don’t have access to a scanner, please make a note on the spreadsheet so that someone else who does have a scanner can make the request instead.

Finally, some (maybe a lot) of these counties will try to charge us for the data. I think that’s a load of bollocks, seeing as the information has already been gathered (and paid for with tax dollars) – obviously the cost of distributing it is zero. But this is something we just have to live with. Anyhow, if you do encounter a county which charges a fee, PLEASE DO NOT ORDER THE DATA AND PAY FOR IT YOURSELF. I’d hate for us to make duplicate orders and wind up wasting money. Please just make a note of the cost in column F and we’ll revisit this soon in a co-ordinated fashion.

A complete list of counties we need (plus a few cities and towns) is below the fold, and of course in our crowdsourcing spreadsheet. Oh, and please share your tips/experiences in comments. Let’s get to work!