Submitted by bkh on November 11, 2007 - 19:03

Full Election Results

Below we provide several files to help understand election results. Allegheny County provides election results from their website at www.county.allegheny.pa.us/elect/

Our files are generated from those. There are two main advantages to our files:

  • They tell a more complete story.
  • They are in a spreadsheet format, making it easier for you to play with the data to do your own analysis.

Note: our files are not official election results. We provide them as a service based on the public results; there may be unintentional errors.

Here are the files we have currently:

For more details on what the files contain, read below. We hope to add results from the primaries soon (our program needs to be modified to handle primary files). We intend to release the actual software (a Perl program) we are using to create these files as well, but it needs to be cleaned up first.

Telling the whole story

Did you ever see news stories about elections in which Fidel Castro or Saddam Hussein received more than 99% of the vote? Of course, they were the only ones on the ballot. Did you ever wonder what their real level of support was?

Does it surprise you that in the 2007 general election in Allegheny County, 138 out of 238 single-winner races were won with more than 98% of the vote? That's 58% of the races! These include 6 out of 9 County Council races and 2 out of 5 Pittsburgh City Council races. Of course, in every case, there was only one candidate on the ballot (mostly Democrats but some Republicans).

What is the true level of support for these candidates? Our summaries help answer this question by also displaying the number of abstentions: voters who cast a ballot but did not vote in the given race. If voters do not like any of the choices on the ballot, their only options are to cast a write-in vote or to abstain. In general, 1-2% of people do cast write-in votes even when there is no write-in campaign, but many more abstain. Those abstentions do not explicitly appear in the official election results. Our summaries include three percentages for each candidate: the percent of registered voters, the percent of voters (including abstentions), and the percent of votes cast in the race.

Spreadsheet format

The files above are in comma-separated value (CSV) format, which should be readable by all modern spreadsheet applications. This makes it easier for you to arrange and analyze data in ways that are helpful to you. We hope you'll share any discoveries you find when analyzing the data.

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