Back following the 2000 presidential election, when the VTP was originally formed, one of the most difficult aspects of our early research was compiling data on how much money is spent on local, state and federal election administration. As some readers may recall, in the end we were forced to rely on some relatively poor-quality data in our 2001 report, “Voting: What Is, What Could Be.”

Recently one of the VTP’s graduate student researchers, Sarah Hill, made data available from her research. Sarah compiled election administration finance data from California counties, ranging from 1992-2003, and she has archived her database in the VTP’s new data archive, located at the following link. Our hope is that Sarah’s research in this area, and her data collection efforts, will help foster more research in this area, so that we can develop a better understanding of how much money is being spend in the United States on election administration, and also then determine what level of service to the voter this money is buying.

If you do use this data, please to give Sarah Hill, a graduate student in Social Sciences at Caltech, credit for collecting and distributing this important new database to fellow researchers.