United States Historical Election Returns, 1788-1823 (ICPSR 79)
Version Date: Feb 11, 2026 View help for published
Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s)
Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
Series:
https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR00079.v6
Version V6 (see more versions)
Summary View help for Summary
This data collection contains general election returns for the offices of president, governor, and United States representative in the period 1788-1823. These returns comprise an extension of the general election collection (see United States Historical Election Returns, 1824-1968 (ICPSR 1)) back to the occurrence of the first elections held under the United States Constitution. The data are recorded chiefly at the county level, although town-level returns were collected and preserved as well for the New England states. This collection of Early National period election returns is much less complete than the body of returns available for the years from 1824 to the present. Fugitive and nonextant sources resulted in the recovery of only approximately half of the possible returns for elections in this period. The collection and processing of the pre-1824 election materials was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
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Subject Terms View help for Subject Terms
Geographic Coverage View help for Geographic Coverage
Smallest Geographic Unit View help for Smallest Geographic Unit
Town
Distributor(s) View help for Distributor(s)
Time Period(s) View help for Time Period(s)
Data Collection Notes View help for Data Collection Notes
- See also the related collections, United States Historical Election Returns, 1824-1968 (ICPSR 1), and Candidate Name and Constituency Totals, 1788-1990 (ICPSR 2).
- The documentation for the collection, Candidate Name and Constituency Totals, 1788-1990 (ICPSR 2) is the same documentation for this study. The information provided in ICPSR 00002 further documents the data in ICPSR 0001, 0013 and 0079 and provides party codes for all elections.
Study Purpose View help for Study Purpose
The purpose of this study is to capture town and county United States historical election returns for the years 1788-1823.
Universe View help for Universe
Counties in 22 states, and towns in 5 New England states of the United States in the period 1788-1823.
Unit(s) of Observation View help for Unit(s) of Observation
Data Source View help for Data Source
Official election returns provided by state governments.
Data Type(s) View help for Data Type(s)
Description of Variables View help for Description of Variables
Each dataset contains variables detailing state code, county code and/or town code, congressional district codes, candidate names, office codes, and party codes.
HideOriginal Release Date View help for Original Release Date
1984-06-19
Version History View help for Version History
2026-02-11 Documentation containing variable label information with party codes and full ICPSR data suite added for analyses.
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, 1788-1823. ICPSR00079-v6. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2026-02-11. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR00079.v6
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.
Notes
These data are freely available to data users at ICPSR member institutions. The curation and dissemination of this study are provided by the institutional members of ICPSR. How do I access ICPSR data if I am not at a member institution?