2018 MI General Election Results ## RDH Date Retrieval 04/08/22 ## 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_detailed party of the candidate (always entirely lowercase); write-in candidates/totals represented as NAs party_simplified party of the candidate simplified to be classified as DEMOCRAT, REPUBLICAN, OTHER, LIBERTARIAN or NONPARTISAN 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 county_name county name county_fips county fips code jurisdiction_name in precinct file, county name (except in Alaska, where results are reported by state legislative district) jurisdiction_fips jurisdiction fips code identifier candidate name of the candidate; write-in candidates/totals represented as NAs district district number and/or name; statewide races labelled as "statewide" magnitude int - The number of candidates voted for in a given office-district race. The default is 1 (i.e. a single member winner take all district), with multimember districts having a magnitude matching the number of candidates who can win a race. This will be more common in local races and a select few states for their state house (i.e. NH). 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 date string - The date of the election, formatted as %y-%m-%d. readme_check string - An indicator for whether an issue arose with the data, "TRUE" if so, and "FALSE" otherwise. Description of issues will be documented in the README.md file of the MEDSL github. ## 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 Github and readme regarding all 2018 general election data (https://github.com/MEDSL/2018-elections-official/): 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.