Template for collecting election data

October 2003

You can download a template in the following formats:

Microsoft Excel 2002 (.xls 25kB)
Microsoft Excel 5 (.xls 24.5kB)
Microsoft Excel 4 (.xls 18.4kB)
Text file (.txt 669B)

Please contact us if you would like a template in any other format or if you run into any difficulties entering data.

The idea is to gather vote totals, party affiliations and candidate names for major and minor party candidates and independents for each state, legislative body, year and district for both US House elections and state legislative elections.  Here are the field names we are using and below that is an sample record:

Field names

State, Leg_body, Year, District, Rep, Dem, Other1, Other2, Total, Other1_party, Other2_party, Name_rep, Name_dem, Name_other1, Name_other2, Comments

Sample record

California, State_senate, 1948, 1, 123456, 213452, 1234, 123, , Const, Soc, “Jones, Janet”, “Smith, Rachel”, “Chang, Michael”,“Temple, Shirely”,“This is the comment field for the first sample record.”

Thanks for helping to document our democracy.