United States Historical Election Returns, 1824-1968 (ICPSR 1)

Version Date: Oct 21, 2025

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Principal Investigator(s):
Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research

Series:

https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR00001.v4

Version V4 ()

  • V4 [2025-10-22]
  • V3 [1999-04-26] unpublished
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Summary

Please read the collection notes below; there are many points to be aware of for this collection prior to analysis.

This collection of historical election data contains state files that list county-level returns for over 90 percent of all elections to the offices of president, governor, United States senator, and United States representative from 1824 through 1968. The data files include returns for all parties and candidates (as well as write-in and scattering votes if available for individual states), and for special elections as well as regularly-scheduled contests. Over 1,000 individual party names and many additional unaffiliated candidates are included.

Citation

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. United States Historical Election Returns, 1824-1968. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2025-10-21. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR00001.v4

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Funding

National Science Foundation (GS881)

Subject Terms

Geographic Coverage

Smallest Geographic Unit

United States Counties

Distributor(s)

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
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Time Period(s)

1824 -- 1968

Data Collection Notes

  1. The election data have been matched-merged and fixed-formatted within states. Because of the volume of data available for some states, it was necessary to store the election returns in more than one file per state.

  2. County names have been standardized, including names for counties that have experienced name changes over time. In addition to the names, a county identification number was added to all county-level records. This number allows unique identification of all counties within states.

  3. Data for elections to the office of United States representative have been collapsed to the whole-county level.

  4. The election data files for each county contain the congressional district number of that county at the time of each election for the office of United States representative. When a county was divided into more than one congressional district, a code value indicating the number of congressional districts into which the county was divided was inserted in place of the congressional district number. It is thus possible to aggregate to the congressional district level all county-level election data (except in the case of split-district counties), and to perform the aggregations for the districts as they were constituted for any Congress.

  5. Counties may have been assigned a congressional district number of zero if they were not in existence at the time of the election, did not report vote totals, or did not participate in that election.

  6. For election returns data from 1970 to 1990, see "General Election Data for the United States, 1950-1990 (ICPSR 13)."

  7. Dataset 32 is titled "Election Returns for Delaware, 1823-1876" and includes data from 1832, while the study title "United States Historical Election Returns, 1824-1968" does not include the year 1823.

  8. In datasets 126, 127, 128 and 129 for Georgia, the county identification code for Jackson county is 1510 in the data, however, it should be 1570. Users are advised when analyzing these data by county to either use the county names in variable V2 or recode the county identification in variable V3 from 1510 to 1570 for Jackson county.
  9. For all data files, V1 is labeled "ICPR STATE CODE." This reflects previously used institutional title. Users may note difference from currently used acronym, ICPSR, since title change.
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Study Purpose

The purpose of this study is to capture United States county-level historical election returns over the time period of 1824 to 1968.

Unit(s) of Observation

County

Data Source

official election returns provided by state governments

Data Type(s)

Description of Variables

Variables within each dataset in this study contain variables capturing state code, county name, congressional district numbers over time, and county-level election returns.

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Original Release Date

1984-06-19

Version History

2025-10-21 Fileset 204 has been retired for this study update, since it contains only study-level documentation, not data files. The study-level documentation is being released in a series of PDF for this update.

2018-02-15 The citation of this study may have changed due to the new version control system that has been implemented. The previous citation was:

  • Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. United States Historical Election Returns, 1824-1968. ICPSR00001-v4. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2025-10-21. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR00001.v4

1999-04-26 A machine-readable listing of political party codes has been added to the collection as Part 204.

1997-09-26 SAS and SPSS data definition statements have been generated for all parts, and reformatted logical record length data files are now available for Parts 12, 33, 34, 35, 84, 96, 101, 104, 130, 156, and 194.

1984-06-19 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

  • Performed consistency checks.
  • Created variable labels and/or value labels.
  • Standardized missing values.
  • Performed recodes and/or calculated derived variables.

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Notes