 All right, it is 10.02, and we have a packed agenda today. So, well, 10.02 in Snowy, Colorado. And we have a packed agenda today, so let's go ahead and get started. Hello, everybody. My name is Larry Eames. I use heath and his pronouns. And welcome to the Help. I'm an accidental government information librarian webinar series, or as we call it, Help for short. This series is brought to you by the American Library Association's Government Documents Roundtable. And we have special guests today, which we'll talk about a little bit later. And thank you so much for coming. You will be muted during this webinar, but we encourage you to participate in chat. If you don't see a chat window, you can click on the chat icon at the bottom of your screen. We also encourage you to send questions via the Q&A function throughout today's session. We'll save questions for the end, but we encourage you to submit them as you think of them. If there are any technical issues, Samantha Hagar is on hand to help. Feel free to use chat to get in touch with her. First case scenario, though, do remember that this webinar is being recorded and will be shared to our YouTube channel later. So be sure to stay tuned for our spring slate of webinars. If you have topics or ideas that you would like to see presented, please let me know. I'm going to drop a handful of links here in the chat for everyone to stay in touch with us. You can shoot me an email if you have ideas and to see more of our previous webinars, you can check out our YouTube channel. And if you're a YouTube user, please give us a follow. It'd be great to have that. So today's webinar is US and International Election Data. And I'm going to turn it over to Charmaine to introduce our speakers. Hi, everybody. Can everybody hear me? Can everybody hear me? Yes, we can. OK. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Goat Art Health and Pippers Professional Development webinar on domestic and foreign elections. My name is Charmaine Enriquez, and I'm one of the committee members serving on the Pippers Professional Development Committee. Today we have two wonderful experts who will discuss and show a search strategies and resources for conducting research on domestic and international and foreign elections, including finding raw and aggregate data. They will speak for 40 minutes, 20 minutes each, and there will be additional 20 minutes left for Q&A. So as Larry said, don't forget to put your questions in the chat box. Our US election speaker is Katherine Morse. Katherine was previously the International Document Librarian at Northwestern University Libraries and is currently the government information law and political science librarian at the University of Michigan Libraries. She holds the MLIS from Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois, and has been a longtime member of Goat Art. Katherine served as Pippers member at large from 2018 to 2020 and is finishing up her two-year term on the membership committee of which she was chair in 2019-2020. Our second speaker, the foreign election specialist, is Jeremy Darrington. Jeremy, who received his MLIS at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, is the Politics Librarian at Princeton University. He has served as the Pippers sectional chair, was the past chair of the Review and Planning Committee, and is currently the chair of the Marta Lang SAGE CQ Press Award Committee, an award he received himself in 2020 for distinguished contributions to librarianship in political science by an academic librarian. We are very excited and fortunate to have Katherine and Jeremy here with us today. And before I turn it over to Katherine, I would also like to mention that the next Pippers webinar series will happen in April. And it will be about international human rights and climate change instruction. So please join us for that one. Katherine, go ahead. All right, thank you, Charmaine. OK, so first I'm going to share the link to my slides. And then I'm going to try sharing my screen. OK, do you see my slides, US elections data? Yep, looks good, Katherine. Excellent, all right, great. Yes, so I'm Katherine. She, her pronouns. And I have been at Michigan for 17 years now. And when I get asked about elections data, I have a whole series of questions, follow-up questions that I ask the researcher. So it usually starts with somebody saying, well, I'm interested in finding elections data. And then the follow-up questions I always ask are kind of like which election are we talking about? What kind of race are we talking about? President? Are we talking about municipal elections? And then we need to know what kind of geography are we talking about presidential elections data at the county level? Are we talking about congressional election data by district? Of course, we would need to know the time period. And then as you talk more to the researcher, you will start to get a sense of if they want election results, like numbers, counts of who voted for whom. Or are they asking for things that would lead you away from results and more to polls? So are they asking for I'm interested in how many evangelical voters voted in a certain way or how many white women voted in a particular way? Those kinds of questions lead us to polls and studies of voter attitudes or identities. Another thing that we can ask our researchers is what kind of format are you looking for? So if somebody says they want to map elections data, are they looking for a map that's already made? And they just want to see which states are red and which states are blue? Or are they looking for data that they're going to be incorporating into GIS or geographic information systems? So maybe they need a large data set that is going to be particularly compatible for working with GIS. OK, so if we are looking for election results, there are many different places you can go for this and lots of different options out there. And at first, I started listing them all and then I was afraid that it was going to be really long and overwhelming. So I narrowed it down. But just know that there's a lot out there. Here are some of the ones that I have used before. So this is a place where you can, these are places where you can get presidential and congressional election results. These are freely available sources to go. So the Clerk of the House has a website where you can get results for the last 100 years. But these are in PDF, so that may or may not meet your needs. The Federal Election Commission has data and offers it in spreadsheet as well as PDF. And then the American Presidency Project offers a lot of election statistics as well. There are subscription resources that you can turn to to find elections data. And usually the benefit of why you might turn to some of these resources is if you want to get a lot of data and you're hoping to get a spreadsheet in as few clicks as possible. So one option out there is CQ Voting and Elections. If your institution subscribes to this product, they have a download data section. And you can put your parameters together. You can request things like presidential data at the county level. You can add all the years, and then you can click on the Download button. Other places where you can get this data is Data Planet or Statista as well as others. When you need lots of data, then I recommend going to the MIT Election Data and Science Lab. So let me try clicking on this now. OK, so they do a really nice job of presenting long time series of data in a really easy to download format. So let's say we were interested in county presidential election returns from 2000 to 2020. OK, let me move this. OK, so just to give you an idea of what this looks like, this kind of tabular data, if we were to download that, this would work well for a user who wants to join up a table in GIS if they wanted to add county level presidential election results to some other geographic data they were working with. This is what it looks like. So you can see we've got state and county, and then a county FIPS number. So this makes it really easy to put into GIS or into some kind of mapping program. OK, if your institution is an ICPSR member, then ICPSR is a great place to go to download large sets of election data. So I'll show what some of the things that they have. OK, so this is the US Historical Elections Return Series that ICPSR has. So you can get things like candidate name, constituency totals from 1788 to 1990, general election data from 1950 to 1990, lots of good stuff here. All right. So if you are looking for election information or at the state level, there's a lot of interest, I think, in looking at direct democracy initiatives and ballot initiatives and referendum. So one of the sites I like to go to for that is the IRI Initiative and Referendum Institute. So they will provide an overview of what ballot initiatives were up in a particular election kind of by date. And then they also have data they make available that gives you the number of initiatives and how many were approved by state and by year. I also want to mention how great state websites can be. So states, whoever, whatever executive agency within the state is in charge of elections, so maybe that's the Secretary of State or maybe there's a different name for whoever runs the state's elections. But their website will often be a great place to go to get election results data. And I link here to Wikipedia page that links out to states election offices. So that's another great place to go. OK, if you are looking for local elections data or city elections, mayoral elections, your city clerk's office web page might have everything you need. Local newspapers might be doing a good job covering. I also like ballot pedia. They cover the 100 largest cities. That's largest by population. And ballot pedia is also useful if you're looking for school board elections. So they cover 470 different school districts. So that's the school districts from the 100 largest municipalities. And then also the largest school districts in addition to that. So this is the page that they have devoted to school boards. And they also have a page specifically about school board recalls. I thought this was really interesting because that's been a subject that we've seen in the news lately. So here is some of the school board recall information. And there's Michigan with seven recalls. What do you know? OK. OK, so earlier I mentioned maps. Like I said, when researchers say I'm looking to map election results, then the follow-up question I always ask is are you looking for a premade map or are you working with GIS? If somebody wants premade maps and they want to see red states and blue states, the presidential election results map from the American Presidency Project is a great place to go. If your institution subscribes to Social Explorer, you can get those maps covering the period from 1912 to 2020. If you have a researcher who is using GIS, there are some good places to go. The voting and election science team data verse is particularly useful. I'll open that up. So what you can get here is both results at different geographies and then also the boundaries, the shapefiles. So both of those things could be of interest. So we can get precinct level election results here for the last couple of elections. OK, so if the research question is really about finding data about people's attitudes or voter demographics or polling, then we can turn to some different resources. So there are these long-running studies of voter attitudes and voter behaviors. And one of them is the American National Election Study, ANES. And that has been running since 1948. If your institution is an ICPSR member, you can access their data through ICPSR if you want or you can access it from their website. You can download a cumulative file that has all the data from 1948 to the more recent data, or you can do it year by year. And they ask questions of their panel of things like how much faith do you have in institutions? How do you feel about the news? How often do you go to church? All sorts of questions. So if the researcher is trying to do some research into how people with different kinds of beliefs or different kinds of backgrounds might feel about voting or about a party, this would be a good place to go. OK, exit pool data is really important. Since when you go to vote and you fill out your ballot, you're not actually providing any kind of demographic information about yourself. These exit polls are one way that we can make those conclusions that this is the candidate that young people voted for or this is the candidate that women voted for. So the Roper Public Opinion Pool Archive is a great place to go for exit pool data. So here we are looking at a page from their elections and presidents page comparing Carter and Mondale with Ford and Dole. Some other places you can go to get polling data would be the Pew Research Center. They have a lot of interesting stuff about voters and about how likely they are to vote, what turnout was, what they feel strongly about. And Gallup is another organization that does a lot of polling in this area and especially about attitudes about politics. So questions like what is the most important issue of the day and do you think the country is going in the right direction? Do you think the economy is going in the right direction? These are the kinds of polls that we hear about in the news a lot. Gallup does those. OK. If part of the research question is finding data about voter participation, here are some sites you can turn to. So the United States Election Project has voter turnout and voter turnout demographics. This is what that website looks like. So they have national turnout rates from 1787 to 2018. OK. The Census Bureau is another place you can go to get some voting and registration data as well. So I know a lot of us work on college campuses. So I wanted to be sure to include this study because I think it's really interesting. But if you have ever wondered what it's like on your own college campus in terms of how active our students with voting, this study, the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement tracks voting on college campuses. This is a screenshot of the executive summary from the 2020 report. But they found that students were very motivated. There was unprecedented turnout. They had a higher voting yield than in the 2016 election. They also found that younger college students were more active with voting than older college students. I thought that was quite interesting. If your institution is a member of this study, a participant in this study, then there might be somebody at your institution that gets a report specifically tailored to your institution. So we had a big initiative on our campus in 2020. We had a whole theme semester devoted to democracy and elections. And we have a student engagement center that was leading a lot of these efforts. And the library worked with them. And we thought about different ways we could collaborate. And I know that our Student Engagement Center is the liaison for the University of Michigan in this study. And so after the 2020 election was over, I reached out to that Student Engagement Center. And I said, hey, do we have the report yet? And they sent it to me. And it was really interesting to see. And it felt really great to read because I saw how participation on our campus had increased over previous elections. And so that was really nice to see. All right. So I think I am close to the end of my time. But I just wanted to say that my tip that I really recommend is to look for live guides or the way other libraries have put together live guides for elections. And one of the live guides that I use a great deal is Jeremy's elections live guide. So this is for the Princeton Library Voting and Elections research guide. And I really appreciate how it is organized by the geography of data you might be looking at. So that is my tip for you all. If all else fails, look for someone's live guide. And hopefully you can find it that way. All right. Thank you. I'm going to stop sharing now and hand it over to you, Jeremy. All right. Let me unmute myself and share my screen here. All right. Can you guys see my slides here? Awesome. Yeah. All right. So that was a great presentation from Catherine. And you're going to see some clear overlap in the strategies we use because these are trying into strategies for finding elections data. And I'm going to try to go through this quickly. Obviously, this is going to be a little bit challenging to do. The big challenge with foreign election data and international elections is just the diversity of stuff that's out there. So a lot of the stuff that Catherine mentioned in terms of the challenges of trying to find election data is just exacerbated by dealing with stuff outside of the United States. So I often point out when I talk about US elections to people, it's the challenge that federalism brings in terms of trying to find data, everything from decentralized election administration to the county or other levels. The great divergence in laws, regulations, reporting requirements, et cetera, difficulties for lining up boundaries to things that people actually want to find, all of that is present except for maybe the decentralized elections administration part in most countries that is not so bad. But it's just kind of amped up on steroids when you deal with foreign elections and makes life a lot harder to deal with. And so then you get to throw in language barriers, which is just gonna make all of this much more challenging. And one of the things that comes up is, one of the big challenges has to do is just the complexity of electoral system. So at least in the United States we're dealing mostly with just like one typical election system, one type of way of governing sort of voting and the allocation of votes. But there are quite a few different types of electoral systems out there in the world. And the way to really think about this is, well, I'll show you a slide in a minute that kind of outlines what some of these look like, but you really wanna think about these in terms of sort of a continuum of how proportional elections are. And that's how well the votes that people cast actually translate into seats for parties that they favor. And related to that is sort of what we call the level of wasted votes, which is how many votes people cast for parties that don't win any seats in the legislature. And so if you have a non-proportional system, like a typical sort of plurality first past the post system, if you have two parties in a single seat district, whatever, and you vote for your party and 48% people vote for your party, 52% of people vote for the other party in that district, well, 48% of the people don't get anything out of their vote, right? They don't get a party that they care about, a candidate they care about, right? So different systems have different methods for making those votes be a bit more proportional in terms of translating into actual party support in a legislature. Now, there are other things that play into this and a big one is district magnitude. This is something that's really different than the United States generally, right? Is that in lots of systems, many countries have a parliamentary system and in most of those systems outside of the United States, many districts have more than one seat available in a particular district, right? So you might have a particular legislative district and it might award two seats, it might award four seats. It just kind of depends on the system. And so that's gonna have an impact on sort of the party support that ends up getting seats in a particular legislative district or a legislature at a particular point in time. Other things that matter are the way the seats are allocated, right? So when you have a proportional system, you can have different methods for deciding well, what percentage of votes at what particular sort of stage in the allocation translates into seats. That's a little bit complicated and I'm not gonna go into it but just know there are sort of different methods for doing that. They can have implications for how many votes translate into seats and how proportional the outcome ends up being. And then because proportional representation means that you're likely to have many more parties represented in your legislature or parliament, many countries will impose some kind of minimum threshold, right? So you have to get like 2% of votes for your party in order to get seats allocated or maybe it's 5% in some places, it's really high as like 10%, right? Which has the effect of reducing fragmentation in terms of how many parties are represented. So you don't end up with like 20 parties in your legislature, but it then means that you're gonna have sort of more wasted votes, right? Because some people may vote for a party that doesn't pass a threshold, they don't get represented in the legislature at all. So just kind of a visual cue of what that sort of looks like, right? When you look at electoral systems, this comes from the ACE Electoral Knowledge Project. It's a super great source, I'll show you a little bit more about this in a minute. But this is a nice little diagram just to show kind of the complexity involved here that running from sort of the least proportional systems, these kind of plurality first past the post system, this is typically what we're familiar with in Anglo-American elections. Whoever wins the most votes in that single seat district wins to such much more proportional kinds of versions and many things in between, all sorts of varieties for how this is done. And I'll just, as a side note mentioned that electoral systems terminology is super confusing. It's very jargony. It can be really confusing to talk about. Even experts in this area in English are often confusing each other because some of the terminology is not super clear. And there's a great piece in a recent Oxford handbook on electoral systems that makes a whole argument about sort of terminology, lays out some of the terminology, talks about some ways of thinking about, maybe coming up with some better terminology. But the problem is, of course, that a lot of these things have a long, long history and it's hard sometimes to dislodge the jargon once it's already there. All right, so this is gonna look really familiar from Catherine's presentation because the same kinds of questions that I asked are the same kinds of questions that she was mentioning. So first, what kind of election are we dealing with? Is it parliamentary or are we talking presidential elections, right? That's a big difference. Most countries have, especially in Europe, have parliamentary systems, right? That's the seat of both legislative and executive power. Some places are hybrid, have both a parliament and a president. The level of sort of power differential between those two can vary a lot between different systems. Also, you have different regional things. So sometimes there are sort of regional bodies that may be of interest to people or local municipal elections like Catherine mentioned. There can also be, you know, super national institutions like the European Parliament, which I'm not really gonna talk about, but add sort of an additional layer of complexity. Probably more relevant though, is also to think about like what kinds of results people are looking at. So I'm only talking about election results here. Like Catherine mentioned, there are lots of other things related to elections, but I'm not gonna get into related to sort of public opinion and other kinds of data. But even just here in terms of election results, often people think, well, I just want party votes. I just want total votes, right? But you may also be interested, not just in party votes, but maybe people are just mostly interested in party vote shares. Like what percentage of the vote did particular parties win, right? That might be a better indication of sort of broad support and, you know, cleavages in a particular country than just total votes. But you may also want to know like, well, how did those things translate into seats and control of power in the actual legislature, right? So you might look for seat totals by party. You might look for seat shares, like the percentage of seats that are seats, that was a tongue twister, that a particular party wins in a legislature, right? Those are all different things and they'll be reported somewhat differently. Of course, geographic level matters a lot. You know, are you looking just at the national level? Are you interested in sort of the constituency or kind of the district? Are you interested in sort of breakdowns by, you know, sort of subnational jurisdictions below the constituency? Those are all things to take into consideration. And then of course, you know, what time period? I'll just make a note that, you know, it's hard enough sometimes to find good election data for some countries, even for the current stuff. And going back in time can be really, really difficult and sometimes impossible, right? They're even well-established democracies. I'm thinking here like United States, like Catherine mentioned, we have lots of great data, but there's lots of stuff that's just, you know, it wasn't preserved. But even other places, I was working on a question recently for somebody who was interested in constituency results in France, you know, from the late 19th century to, you know, kind of the present. Well, it turns out that they just weren't well-documented. They weren't well-preserved. There are some historical sources in France for late 19th century, early 20th century that report, you know, actual constituency results by candidate name, but not by parties because the party system itself was not well-developed and it wasn't generally reported. There wasn't an electoral body that did it because there were frequent changes of regime, right? And it's not until after World War II was sort of the establishment of the Fourth Republic of France that you really get sort of consistent election data that you can find. And then sometimes, you know, things happen, right? Like fires happen in France is another good example. Some regional data and some sub-national data has been lost, you know, due to destruction in a major archive. You know, so those kinds of things happen as well. And then finally, what format do you want, right? You know, are you just fine with some kind of list of results? That's gonna make your life a lot easier for you and your researcher. If you want machine readable format data, there are definitely options, but you may be more limited, especially depending on, you know, countries. So like the developing world is often gonna be a lot harder. So, one other thing I will say is, let me see if I can flip over to, can you see my website or my browser now? Has anybody seen that? Yep, let's do it. Okay, wanna make sure we're sharing. So, you know, there are, I mentioned here, if you wanna get sort of details, and I have a lot of these linked on my guide that I'll share, but you know, this is from this electoral project, the ACE electoral project that sort of lays out the differences in electoral systems. If you wanna read more about them, their advantages, disadvantages, things like that. But for many elections, it's also really helpful to get that context before you go searching. Make sure you understand what sort of the electoral system is and what the various sort of key geographies are gonna be, what they're called in their native languages, cause that's gonna be important as you go searching for that kind of data. And sometimes just the broader context, right? Because an important thing to keep in mind for you and your researcher is that, you know, elections in lots of places are pretty shady, right? And so there are gonna be cases where like, you know, there may be election data, it may be available even in a nice machine readable format, but it may be completely bogus, right? So keeping that kind of context in mind is really helpful. And there's some good sources that, you know, you can use, obviously you can look at new sources. Wikipedia is always a good sort of first cut sometimes just to kind of get kind of a little bit of the lay of the land. But like the Journal of Democracy has a great section, they've been tracking since the early 90s, you know, elections, you get these sort of nice coverage of like, you know, just a rundown of what happened in a particular election, give you a better sense of context, which can be sometimes really helpful to sort of understand what was going on, what might be some of the issues or traps that might be there. The IFES, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems has a lot of really great information as well. And they have a whole section dedicated to sort of election FAQs or little primers. And these are especially useful to kind of get a sort of a taste of what's coming up in particular elections to see like what's gonna be at stake. They often have a little sort of infographic that lays out kind of key data about the election. We'll give you a little bit of context, especially about sort of the electoral and legal sort of system, how voting is gonna be carried out. And that can provide some useful context as well. So let me go back to the slide. All right, so thinking about sources, I'm trying to keep my eye on time. Possible places to look for elections data, because it's such a big world in so many countries, right? This is gonna be all over the place. I can only give you this sort of broad brushstrokes, happy to answer questions, you know, to the extent that I know anything about it. A good place often to start though, especially if you want kind of comparative data is to look for some, at some of the big academic data collections. Typically, these are limited usually to sort of parliamentary lower house because that's kind of the common denominator for many forms of government across the world. And it makes it sort of much more comparable so you can get these results at individual constituency levels across lots of parliaments at one time. A good example of that is the CLEA data set. This is a big project that's been around constituency level elections archive. They actually have some upper chamber stuff, but not nearly as much as the lower chamber stuff is kind of the primary source of data in here. And because it's, you know, the primary source of government for many countries, you can see the different countries that are covered in here, it's quite a few countries. You can get a sort of layout of where they go. Some places go back quite a far time historically, but typically you're looking at sort of, you know, kind of after the post war or sort of, you know, mid 70s for many countries that are sort of newer democracies, you can download this all, it's all in sort of like data set format and like state of format or other kinds of forms, but you also, if you just want to get like a spreadsheet of one or a couple of elections, you can go in and have this sort of subsetting tool that will let you just kind of filter down by country and by time period and choose just the election sort of sets that you want, which is pretty nice. So it's a nice place to start if you want kind of broad coverage of lots of countries in a comparable sort of nice tidy data format. Now, for many places, depending on what you want, you're going to need to go beyond that. And the best place to start, and this was like Katherine mentioned, sort of like in the United States, if you go down to the state, you know, level, same thing here at the country level, you're often going to want to look for the official electoral commission, which has sort of the responsibility for, you know, conducting elections and or sort of reporting election data. Not every country has one of these, but you know, in contrast to United States, many countries do have one that cover elections across the entire country, which makes life a little bit easier. Sometimes another source to look at are sort of government open data sites can be also useful places. And I'll show you a couple of examples of these. So just as an example of two electoral commissions, here's one for Australia, they do really nice job with their elections and sort of making their election data available. It's just, you know, nicely sort of laid out here. You can browse kind of back by time period and they have all their data available. It's all available in like spreadsheets. It's really nice to just be able to download it all in one go. This is a little bit more typical if you're dealing with elections in other countries that you'll find, you know, often they're really good sites, especially European countries, obviously they're the more developed world, but they'll be all in the native language. Sometimes in some countries, they'll have like an English language version. So it's worth kind of browsing around, but very often the English language version of a government site from other countries is gonna be bare bones. You won't have all the detailed data that you want. So sometimes you have to just go through the native language interface and, you know, Google Translate would be your friend here to kind of like clutch your way through this, but you can usually get to the general area you need to go. And often they have these sort of nice like a little interactive features and you can like visualize data, but often they have the data just all directly downloadable on some of the better sites like this one from Germany. You can even get it down here at the individual sort of, you know, regional sort of province level here in Germany. Another thing to, I'll just mention is this is from Puerto Rico actually, that many places will have sort of a dedicated, if you look at the URL up here, you can actually link to this from their election commission, but when you get into individual elections, they have just their own sort of unique URL that's dedicated just to a particular election. And so that's not uncommon for many different countries if they just set up a unique website that just, you know, prior to the election will have information about how to register and how to vote for this upcoming election and have sort of news and data, our news and analysis about what's coming up. And then after the election, they'll actually report the results here and you can kind of go through and sort of, you know, drill down to whatever level of information they provide. This one, you know, being Puerto Rico, it's nice because it has both in Spanish and in English version. Now on the open government, like I mentioned, you know, even if you can find the data election by election, sometimes these open government sites in some places, like France has a really nice open government data site that has a ton of data about elections here that's all pulled together in sort of a nice machine readable format. And a lot of this goes back a fair way in time. And so, you know, you can kind of browse through things like that. So sometimes that's a good place to look for it as well if you're not finding sort of a major electoral body that presents it in a nice data format that's a place to look. Other places to look on especially in the machine readable sort of form is like independent research centers in a particular country or social science data archives or country statistical agencies, right? These can be really, really helpful. As an example, you know, here's like the UK data archive, you know, they do a great job on a lot of stuff. And they have a whole section related just to, you know, elections and these sort of election data sets that have been compiled often by researchers over time. So sometimes, especially when you look at historical data that can be useful. Here's an example of a statistical website from Statistics Norway, which, you know, we love our Scandinavian friends, especially they have such great social science data archives and statistical agencies, they put some amazing stuff up. And this is just like this great table, it's got all this historical data and you can go in and just kind of like, you know, filter your table by exactly what you want and then get it in a nice data format and download it, which is super cool. Other places, especially in the developing world it's harder to come by and often the government websites, if they exist won't have any useful information or they'll be broken, that's like super common. So here's an example, like this one is, this is actually a research center out of a university in India. And this is not uncommon, like when you're dealing with sort of foreign election stuff to run into some weird problem, you're like, what on earth is this? Fortunately this one, that's just like a weird sort of like Linux error or something and the actual site works most of the time. And so like this is an independent center that has pulled together a lot of elections data going back in time for the Luxaba in sort of the national parliament in India going back over time, which otherwise has been really, really hard to find for India, so this is a great source. Other sources that you can look at, don't discount Wikipedia, right? Like it's amazing, like I'm always surprised at what's in Wikipedia, but you know, it's particularly useful, I don't ever use it for like, for the most part for actually getting election data, but I use it especially as you know, most of you would probably want to do to find data that you can find like official sources, right? So looking at, you know, tables of sources in here and saying, okay, where can I go to find the actual reports and see like, you know, was there some kind of an official report or website listed here where I can actually drill down and get the data in machine readable format. And so these are super great. They're also great for finding sometimes like these random one-off like, you know, monographs that were published on a particular election, especially historical that you can leverage for additional data. Now, sort of outside of kind of those major sources, sometimes new sites are gonna be your best bet in especially many countries. These often just be at sort of like, you know, the national level, sometimes they've got nice visualizations for major countries that you can drill down into. Sometimes the best you're gonna do is just to get sort of results kind of in a list format and it won't be sort of machine readable data. The very best sites are gonna look sort of like this one from Ireland's nice visualizations. You can drill down at any of these little sort of constituencies and zooms you in. You can get all the data down here and see the individual candidates, all of this. It's super cool. So those are, they're true even for many developing countries. Sometimes those will be your best bet in terms of finding that data. Other types of places you can go are sort of like hobbyist sites, right? There are lots of people that are super interested in elections and especially for particular individual countries, that may be your best, your best best. Just do a bunch of searching online until you find somebody who's maybe been compiling this. As an example, Adam Carr has been doing this for a long time and he actually covers stuff across the world. You know, this is not machine readable data and usually it's just at the national level. Some countries have like subnational stuff but you know, there's a ton of stuff in here and you know, you can see like these, often he has like these cool maps, even if you don't get like, you know, the individual sort of like data. Oh, I went into the map section there, I didn't mean to do that. But if you go into the listing here, you can see the countries that are covered, which country and elections that he covers. This can be particularly useful for like presidential elections. I haven't really talked much about that. Presidential elections are actually a little bit harder to find in general in terms of sort of the reporting and that's because often many less democratic countries across the world tend to have presidential systems. And so they haven't been as forthcoming with posting their data. But you know, lots of great sources in here that you can use. And then the final thing all this mentioned is, you know, looking for reference works on elections and I know I'm probably like blowed way past my time. It's just to say, you know, there are lots of election sources that sometimes you can look at. The one I'll just last one I'll finish with here is, Dieter Nolan put together this really fabulous selection of these massive reference works. They're like a thousand or 2,000 pages long covering election data from different countries all around the world. And it took like 20 years to publish these. And so it's a super great source. You know, if you have them at your library, if you don't, I recommend going out, buying a copy if you can afford it. And if they're still in print because these are pretty amazing for many countries they'll be often your best bet for both context and data. And I know I just realized I blew way past my time. So I'm gonna stop. Well, thank you both very much for sharing your expertise. I know I had my camera off, but I definitely went bug-eyed at like a couple of these resources like, oh my God, that's perfect. That's exactly what I've always needed. And we're seeing a lot of love, especially for Adam Carr and for Wikipedia in the chat. And something that I always love about these webinars is the audience is also sharing some resources in the chat. So if folks are interested in some of those, those links are there. And I'll open things up with a question that Loris asked that I think was inspired by your presentation, Jeremy, but might be more for Catherine. Does Texas still have multiple seat state house districts? Apparently they did in the mid century. That really surprised me. I was not aware of that. So I would open it up to anyone to please chime in. Anybody else is probably more of an expert on Texas legislature than I am. I went over to the house of representatives and was looking through their resources and it looks to me like it's one person representing a district. But yeah, that was a really interesting thing. I mean, that really blows my mind. So yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I'd have to go research it like Catherine was saying. I don't know. Mostly, like I mentioned, the United States is mostly first past the post kind of system, but there is increasingly starting to be like different places in the United States that are experimenting with new forms. A good example, maybe the most prominent one in recent times in New York City's recent mayoral election, which used ranked choice voting for the first time, right? Different places, municipalities, big cities have been more likely to go that route over time. I think San Francisco has done this in the past. There's some other places. Interestingly, the Constitution allows states to set the times and determinations for voting in their jurisdiction. So actually I think it's Maine, where last couple of years has been experimenting with ranked choice voting in their congressional district, right? And so like, which is super interesting, right? That like that's pretty different from what were used to other places. And so it's really interesting to see that kind of laboratory of democracy happening at the state level and hopefully more of that's gonna happen over time. Cause I think there's a lot of sense that like, we need to play around some different systems in the United States and see if we can come up with some better outcomes. Yeah, absolutely. And Chelsea's noting in the chat that the potential for ranked choice voting, there's potential for ranked choice voting in Washington state, which I moved from Washington and they make a cool change like that. So I'll comment again that chat is open, Q and A is open for folks to participate and ask some questions, but I'll ask one of my own to kind of keep the conversation going. I'm always kind of curious to ask like, what are people's like weirdest questions that they've asked and that kind of extends to a question that I also like to ask, which is what's like a sleeper source that you love to refer people to that maybe you mentioned in your presentation, maybe you didn't, but like your sort of favorite thing to be like, oh, I am so excited that I get to recommend this to you. Well, one thing I thought of, and this was suggested in the chat as well by Christopher is the Dave Leap data. And that was one of the things I felt like I couldn't include because of time, but I'm really glad he mentioned it because it is a great source for data and he includes the link there in the chat as well. If you aren't familiar with it, one thing that's really striking about it is that Dave Leap doesn't use the, doesn't use red and blue the way that we've all come to, used to seeing it where red means Republican and blue means Democrat, he uses it the other way. So if you're working with a student, there's just that like initial shock, but then, you know, you can adjust and he's got this whole explanation of why he likes it that way. Yeah, the backstory on that, I think, is that historically he started doing those maps before that became a convention, which is one of those things actually sparks an interesting conversation with the students, right? That like, that's not always been the case, right? That like red was Republican, blue was Democrat, right? That's a recent innovation since like, you know, kind of the 80s, 90s or whatever. And, you know, so it's useful to think about like we could do these different colors entirely. We do purple and green, right? And like see like how that shakes things up. Yeah, yeah. So that's one that I really like and, you know, one nice thing if you purchase data from him is, and you're able to host data locally in your library is then you have it there and it's set and it's always the same for when you go back to it. So that's, that would be one that I always turn to because I know it's always gonna be the same whereas so many other interfaces change and then you've gotta figure it out. Yeah, and sort of similarly Canadian notes that the colors are swap or Nadine notes in Canada that the colors are swap. There's always like a brief moment of like, oh right, for me when I'm looking at Canadian data. And so I'll also kind of slide in here because we did get a question in the chat. I'm wondering about the timing of availability for US election data. How soon after elections can we usually get data? And then does that depend on state or level of election? And does it depend on which source you consult also? Which I really like all of the different elements of that. Thank you, Chelsea. Yeah, and that's such an interesting question. And it's one that would have been interesting would we even be wondering this before the 2020 presidential election, which was like a whole thing. But like, you know, a lot of times the state's Board of Elections or Secretary of State, they wait until things are like officially that those counts are official. And so whatever process that is. And so remembering the news in the 2020 cycle, it takes a while before those counties certify and then the state certifies and then they would post it. So you can get preliminary data from the news, often that night before you go to bed, the night of the election, but the official results will take way longer depending on how long it takes your estate to certify. And then sometimes the states investigate, right? And so then they, well, not sometimes, I guess very specifically in our most recent election, there were some states that decided to look into it again. So yeah, that's a very interesting question on when things are official and when is it done and when is it over? And it also matters depending on the kind of data you're looking for, right? So like, you know, sort of the type, like individual constituencies sort of district level results, those can come out fairly, fairly fast. And you know, like even the electoral commissions themselves will often report that stuff the same night, like the provisional results like Catherine was mentioning and then the official reports can take weeks depending on what the state regulation deadlines are for certifying, but getting data that's down below the constituency level. So if you wanna look at like precinct data, right? Or other kinds of geographies, that can sometimes take a long time, right? Because, you know, many states don't have any requirement that actually has to be reported from the counties to the state level, like the secretary of state or the division of elections, often it's just a courtesy. And because the elections are governed at the county level and so you have to go to the county website to find that official data, right? And that can take a long time sometimes to produce. Sometimes it's never produced in like a machine readable format. Like just depends on how rural the county is, how poor, how ancient its electoral systems are. With foreign elections, same kind of deal except that, you know, it just will depend on, you know, who's running the election. So if it's a central election administrator, you're in a better shape than, you know, in a federal system. Sure, thank you. We also have a question into Q&A from Brett. Just curious if you hear more from grad students, undergrads or faculty with questions and how do you respond differently? On elections data, it's all over the place. I get questions from people all around the world actually. So it just, you know, it doesn't, the level of researcher doesn't really matter for me. Depends on the research purpose, right? And I think that's something Katharine both mentioned, right? Like what they need is really gonna depend on why they're trying to use the data or how they're trying to apply it. And so that's gonna govern more of the answer than other kinds of things. You know, with the exception that like, you know, maybe a grad student usually wants to collect data from where they'll come and say like, I wanna collect all this data from everywhere, right? And I'll say like, well, you know what, you might wanna scale that back because that's gonna take 15 lifetimes. And so, you know, it will come down to kind of a conversation about like, you know, what is it you're trying to compare? Are those things actually comparable, right? Like when you're dealing with foreign election data, that becomes way trickier. And then, you know, do you need it in machine readable format? You know, if so, your options are gonna be way more limited unless you're willing to put in, you know, an enormous amount of time to collect it and, you know, transcribe it yourself. One pattern I see is with undergrads being more likely to think they're asking for results of, you know, who voted this way in a presidential election by these other demographic indicators. Like I wanna know how women voted, I wanna know how Hispanics voted, you know, evangelical Christians, et cetera, et cetera, people who drive hybrid cars, like all sorts of stuff. And so, I often have to have that conversation about, you know, well, we're not looking for the results, we're looking at exit polls, or we're looking at some kind of like voter attitude study or other things like that. So that's one thing I've noticed. And I think because a lot of the news reporting doesn't make it super clear, so you'll see a lot of headlines that's like this group voted this way. So, yeah, that's a moment that I often take of explaining the differences between those two things. Sure, thank you. And I think, you know, that we're kind of at 11 mountain time, various other top of the hours across the country. Brian has given me a great way to wrap things up. Thank you for the great presentation. Will the recording be available? And the answer is yes. This recording will be available on the Help YouTube and on the Pippers website, which was linked earlier. And I'm also gonna take this opportunity to drop a link in the chat. Pippers does a survey at the end. So please do let us know what you thought of this webinar and we'll take that into consideration as we go forward and plan future webinars. So thank you both to our presenters and to Pippers for helping us at Help organize all of this. It has been great to hear from you all and to see the chat being so hoppin'. So have a great day, everyone.