Subscriber Datasets

Much of the Election Science Lab’s content is publicly available. These data are made available to the general public either because they are supported by external funding or they are relatively low cost to produce and associated with our research mission.

Among our most popular data are precinct boundaries associated with precinct election results. These data are labor intensive to produce and sometimes we must purchase costly voter file data to confirm boundaries. Our data for elections prior to 2022 are still and will continue to be publicly available through our data archive.

Our external funding generously provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to produce precinct boundary and election data expired in 2020. To continue to produce these data we need to recover our costs. Starting with the 2022 data, we provide these data to subscribers in a fee-for-service model. If you wish to gain access to these data please contact the UF Election Lab (election-lab@ufl.edu) for pricing.

If you are a user of our data and disappointed in this change, we suggest the following actions that you can take:

First, please cite our work prominently, as is required by our open source license. People expect data they find on the internet to be free and routinely ignore our citation requirement. Some individuals and organizations misrepresent that they produce our work, either by failing to cite us or burying our citation deep in documentation. Worse, some bad actors resell our data without providing any of their revenue back to us. This has affected us as some funding sources support these individuals or organizations, thinking these other organizations produce our data. This is the primary reason why we had to change our data delivery model.

Second, let us know if you use our data in your work by sending an email to election-lab@ufl.edu. Charitable funding organizations want to know that their support is being used. It strengthens our funding proposals to these organizations when we provide evidence that we have an active and wide user base.

In the long-term we hope that we will be able to sustain our work by building a paid subscriber base. Our plan is to lift the embargo on older datasets, particularly as the 2030 redistricting approaches. We want to provide discounted or free access to users with limited budgets. If a large donor steps forward to support us, we will open our data again.

We hope that you appreciate that there is considerable effort to produce these data and that we are as disappointed as you are that we have to turn to a subscriber model to fund our activities.