Precinct Data
Voting and Election Science Team
The Voting and Election Science Team (VEST) produces the only source of nationwide precinct boundary data enhanced with precinct election results for recent United States elections.
You can download datasets for available years and states through our data archive. You will need geographic information software to analyze these data. We recommend the free software, QGIS.
If you use VEST data, great! For non-commercial purposes, in most cases the Creative Commons license that our data are released under requires that you simply give us credit. Our logo to the left is great to add to maps and websites.
If you would like to cite our data for an academic publication, we recommend citing our Scientific Data article.
You can explore an interactive map of our 2020 presidential election data here.
Who Uses VEST?
A primary purpose of VEST data is redistricting, to determine the potential electoral effects of alternative redistricting plans. New Jersey, Ohio, and Virginia redistricting commissions used VEST data in evaluating districts, as did special masters engaged by state Supreme Courts to draw districts in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Judges weighed evidence created from these data in legal challenges in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah, and Wisconsin. Media organizations such as CNN, Associated Press, The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Politico, Financial Times, 538, and the Cook Political Report use these data in evaluating redistricting plans and for their election reporting. They are incorporated into the online mapping applications Dave’s Redistricting App and our own DistrictBuilder, and the redistricting evaluation tool PlanScore.
Another use of these data is to visualize election results. We produced district maps and election statistics for The Almanac of American Politics, and a vibrant community of mapping enthusiasts produce election maps from our data.
Who is VEST?
The Voting and Election Science Team is based primarily at the University of Florida, with UF Professor Michael McDonald and research analyst Steve Gerontakis as members. The team includes former UF graduate student student Brian Amos, an Associate Professor at Wichita State University. Michal Migurski, executive director of PlanScore, has provided assistance. Over the years a number of graduate and undergraduate research assistants have contributed to VEST, including Mario Villegas, Evan Smith, Maxwell Clarke, RJ Della Salle, Peter Licari, and Sarah Loving.
VEST Inventory
A listing of our November general election datasets is below. We provide additional dataset for selected elections, such as statewide off-year elections. Please browse our data archive to check availability.
Our 2016-2020 data are provided free of charge under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Creative Commons license, through generous support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Houston Endowment, Resilient Democracy, and donors to our charitable UF Foundation Account.
Our 2022-2024 data are provided to paid subscribers. We currently have no external charitable support for these data so we have adopted a subscription model to continue data production. Our plan is to make these data publicly available again when the 2030 redistricting nears or if a donor will again cover our costs. As of now our costs exceed our subscription revenues, so it is unclear if we will be able to meet this goal. If you are interested in becoming a paid subscriber, please contact us at election-lab@ufl.edu.