Potentially Miscoded ROAD Data

The following is a table of the proportion of precincts that are possibly miscoded as zero rather than missing for all major elections (per state per year). The precincts are flagged as potentially miscoded if the total vote for an election in a given precinct (per state per year) is zero. If a cell is blank, either an election was not held in that year or the relevant ROAD file contained no information for this election.

Rechecking against the paper election returns for 5 states suggested that: zeros in NH are correctly coded, zeros in MA,LA, and NC should be recoded as missing, and zeros in SD in which the total vote for that precinct is coded as missing should be recoded as missing. Resources were not available to recheck against all paper data. This paper data is available in our depository for those who wish to visit the center and perform such a recheck. Barring this, we recommend that you use due caution in interpreting votes and registration (including the merged data files we supply) for any contests that may have a large proportion of entries affected by this issue, as shown by the table.

 

 

State

Code

Year

Presidential

Governor

U.S. House

U.S. Senate

State House

State

Senate

Alaska

60

86

 

0.00

0.00

0.00

0.42

0.66

Alaska

60

88

0.00

 

0.00

 

0.42

0.62

Alaska

60

90

 

0.00

0.00

0.00

0.09

0.28

Alabama

30

84

0.00

 

0.00

0.00

 

 

Alabama

30

86

 

0.13

0.15

0.13

0.24

0.20

Alabama

30

88

0.01

 

0.01

 

 

 

Alabama

30

90

 

0.02

0.02

0.02

0.01

0.02

Arkansas

150

84

0.00

0.00

0.00

0.00

 

0.00

Arkansas

150

86

 

0.00

0.00

0.00

 

0.00

Arkansas

150

88

0.00

 

0.01

 

 

0.02

Arkansas

150

90

 

0.00

0.00

0.00

0.00

0.00

Arizona

120

84

0.01

 

0.01

 

 

0.01

Arizona

120

86

 

0.00

0.00

0.00

 

0.00

Arizona

120

88

0.01

 

0.00

0.00

0.00

0.00

Arizona

120

90

 

0.00

0.00

 

 

0.00

Colorado

240

84

0.00

 

0.00

0.00

 

0.00

Colorado

240

86

 

0.01

0.01

0.01

0.01

0.50

Colorado

240

88

0.01

 

0.01

 

0.01

0.48

Colorado

240

90

 

0.00

0.00

0.00

0.00

0.00

Connecticut

270

84

0.09

 

0.10

 

0.08

0.10

Connecticut

270

86

 

0.06

0.05

0.05

0.03

0.06

Connecticut

270

88

0.12

 

0.12

0.12

0.06

0.12

Connecticut

270

90

 

0.17

0.17

 

0.14

0.16

District of Columbia

330

84

0.01

 

0.01

 

 

0.50

District of Columbia

330

86

 

0.00

0.00

 

 

0.50

District of Columbia

330

88

0.00

 

0.00

 

 

0.51

District of Columbia

330

90

 

0.01

0.00

0.01

 

0.50

Delaware

300

84