Clients

In addition to performing grant work for non-profit organizations, we provide election data services to clients. These services leverage our deep understanding to the collection and analysis of election data to assist clients with their needs and goals. Examples of these services include:

Collecting and Analyzing Election Data

The Voting and Election Science Team is the only source for national precinct boundary and associated election results. We have extensive knowledge of how to collect election data and their properties through our years of communicating with local election officials. In our experience, states and localities differ extensively in how they manage their election data. We know how to navigate around potential pitfalls that might otherwise ensnare unwitting researchers. Our deep understanding of these data enables us to provide accurate analyses of these data.

Our past and current clients for these services include The Washington Post and The Almanac of American Politics. In addition, our research assistants have put their talents to work by being hired directly by the Associated Press and the National Election Pool (the media consortium that runs the national exit poll) to assist their election night data production and analyses.

Improving Election Data Integrity

Our election data work sometimes requires geocoding of voter registration addresses as a verification check on the accuracy of electoral boundaries. We have extensive knowledge of how geocoding algorithms apply to voter registration addresses. While geocoding may reveal an electoral boundary error, it may also reveal election officials have inadvertently assigned voters to the wrong electoral geography, such as a precinct or district. We published our approach in the top political science methodology peer-reviewed journal.

We assisted the Colorado Secretary of State and the Virginia Division of Elections to communicate to with their local election officials to identify and properly reassign tens of thousands of registered voters to the correct precinct to vote in.

Redistricting

Governments and outside groups use our election data during redistricting to evaluate potential electoral effects of new district boundaries. The impressive list of governments using our freely-available data include the Ohio Redistricting Commission, the Virginia Redistricting Commission, the New Jersey congressional and state legislative redistricting commissions, and state Supreme Courts in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Our data have been used in numerous lawsuits, some even adjudicated before the United States Supreme Court. Numerous media organizations use our data, such as the The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Associated Press, Financial Times, 538, and the Cook Political Report.

We care about fair districts and have experience assisting with redistricting services beyond simply providing data. We assisted the Gainesville, Florida city commission (where UF is located) to redraw their districts and provided analysis of Florida’s congressional and state legislative maps to the League of Women Voters of Florida.

We Aren’t Out to Make a Fortune

We care about improving election data because it means less voter confusion and a better functioning democracy. As a unit of a nonprofit state university, we price our services to cover our costs. That’s it. Our research assistants include highly skilled students who we train through these projects, and who have gone on to outstanding data science careers.

Furthermore, when we discover shortfalls in election data in the course of our regular research, we collaborate with election officials to improve their data at no cost to them. We’ve produced electronic maps of local election boundaries where none existed before, which local election officials adopted for public dissemination. UF Election Lab member Dr. McDonald served as an advisor to the National States Geographic Information Council on their Geo-Enabled Elections project to encourage election officials to adopt our election accuracy tools on a do-it-yourself basis. Dr. McDonald also served on a National Academy of Sciences working group to provide advice to the United States Census Bureau on their decennial census data disclosure policies.