If open data means anything, it applies to elections. But yet here we are, a week after the results, and open data around the results is hard to find. It matters because having that data allows us to understand the results better, and what they say about America today. It also means that the data can be visualised too.
There are some bright lights: David Wasserman at the Cook Report is waging a one-person mission to count up all the popular votes, as late counting comes in, state-by-state. You can see the results here, on this Google Spreadsheet.
But if you’re after county-level data, it’s tricky to find.
However, one person has been doing just that. Tony McGovern has scraped Townhall.com’s excellently-formatted results to collate the US results, county by county.
Download the county results here >>
John Guerra has used the data already to produce this rather lovely map.
Election map made with the data
Here we are, nearly eight years after data.gov became a reality, and we have to rely on the community to provide data we should all have access to, as of right.
Data journalist, writer, speaker. Author of 'Facts are Sacred', published by Faber & Faber and a 
Simon Rogers 
Can you please add 2020 to this ASAP? I’m very curious of the trends since the total number of votes has increased by such a large margin. It points to possible foul play, in my opinion
Posted by Dave | November 7, 2020, 5:59 amGreat data source for county data – good job!!!
Posted by raul garcia | January 11, 2017, 1:09 amThe 2012 Romney vs Obama results by county can actually be found on data.gov, I think, at https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/presidential-general-election-results-2012-direct-download . When you download and extract the .tar file there, the package includes a .dbf file with all the data, and it comes with a shapefile etc for making maps. Plus the data seems to be more inclusive than the (preliminary?) data from The Guardian – a couple of random counties I checked had slightly higher vote totals than the Guardian data.
Posted by Joost | December 15, 2016, 1:57 pmUsed this data to show my introductory quantitative social science students how to map the (most recent) 2016 election results in R. Thanks so much for sharing these links!
Posted by Todd K. Hartman | December 1, 2016, 12:25 pmGreat info! Thanks for posting.
Posted by JP in AZ | November 29, 2016, 7:26 pmHi, thanks for the county link !! Awesome.
I have built a Power BI dashboard so you can easily visualise the data and make your own analysis.
See here : bit.ly/2eLE8qM
I will add the county-level analysis soon 🙂
Thanks
Posted by Franklin | November 26, 2016, 7:24 pmIf these poor losers get their way and
Figure out a way to eliminate the Electoral College, we should then change the Popular vote to a by County
Vote. This would give all Citizens a fair chance to elect their favorite candidate rather than the Liberal cities doing it for us. The Electoral College is in place to offset this very thing.
Posted by Harold Platteborze | November 24, 2016, 4:59 pmAny idea where to find the county level registered voter numbers?
Posted by Katie Brinkley | November 19, 2016, 4:52 amThis seems to be the place, not sure how up to date it is though.
Posted by Simon Rogers | November 25, 2016, 9:35 amReblogged this on lyndamk's reads and commented:
Access county level data for election 2016
Posted by lyndamk | November 18, 2016, 8:09 pmThis is awesome- and thank you! Any idea if Townhall.com is also pulling registered voter turnout data? I’m having a hard time finding that in one place- and don’t want to scrape every single county’s web listing
Posted by Katie Brinkley | November 17, 2016, 5:32 am