2018 MI General Election Results

## RDH Date Retrieval
07/05/21

## RDH Upload Date
07/14/2021

## Sources
The RDH retrieved the 2018 general election results for Michigan from MEDSL - the MIT Election Data and Science Lab (https://electionlab.mit.edu/data).

## Fields

**Fields:**		**Descriptions:**
'precinct'			precinct name/identifier
'office'			office name
'party'			party of the candidate (always entirely lowercase); write-in candidates/totals represented as NA's
'mode'			mode of voting; states with data that doesn't break down returns by mode are marked as "total"; other states can have modes of "absentee," "machine," "absentee mail," "absentee walk-in," "election day," "polling," "early," "one stop," and "provisional"
'votes'			votes received by this candidate for this particular party
'jurisdiction'			in precinct file, county name (except in Alaska, where results are reported by state legislative district)
'county'			county name
'candidate'			name of the candidate; write-in candidates/totals represented as NA's
'district'			district number and/or name; statewide races labelled as "statewide"
'dataverse'			whether this election corresponds to elections in the Senate ("senate"), US House ("house"), or state ("state") files, or none of these ("local")
'year'			election year
'stage'			electoral stage; always general ("gen") here
'state'			state name
'special'			special election TRUE/FALSE indicator (always FALSE here, no special elections data is included)
'writein'			TRUE/FALSE indicator for write-in candidates/totals
'state_po'			U.S. postal code state abbreviation
'state_fips'			State FIPS code
'state_cen'			U.S. Census state code
'state_ic'			ICPSR state code
 
## Processing Steps
The RDH used Python's Pandas library to separate MEDSL's election data files by state for 2018. For more information on MEDSL's data processing, see MEDSL's Github repository for 2018 returns (https://github.com/MEDSL/2018-elections-official).

## Additional Notes
Information from MEDSL's codebook regarding all 2018 general election data (https://github.com/MEDSL/2018-elections-official/blob/master/codebook-2018-election-data.md):

The source of the data is typically each state's Secretary of State website or comparable elections division page on an official state website. For Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, and Vermont, we used precinct-level returns from the OpenElections project (https://github.com/openelections).

Returns for some states are separated by mode of voting (e.g. election day, absentee, etc.), as indicated by the mode variable in the dataset.

Please contact info@redistrictingdatahub.org for more information.