2020 Election: Voting Information and Civic Engagement

Listed below are resources about elections and links to organizations that study campaigns are elections.

• 270toWin -- this site combines an interactive Electoral College map for the then-current presidential election cycle with historical maps and information for all prior elections. Contains information on the Electoral College system and the integral role it plays in electing the President.
• A New Nation Votes -- a searchable collection of election returns from the earliest years of American democracy, 1787-1825. The data covers all offices from the Federal to the local levels and can be viewed from a complete list of candidates with links to their elections or by state, year, office, jurisdiction, party, or election type.
• American National Election Studies – an organization created in a collaboration of Stanford University and the University of Michigan that produces high quality data from its own surveys on voting, public opinion, and political participation. It conducts research on elections, produces statistical survey data from 1952 to the present, and provides searchable lists and abstracts for various election studies.
• Ballotpedia -- a nonprofit and nonpartisan collaborative digital encyclopedia that includes information about elections, politicians, and candidates at all levels of government. Data ranges from national elections and Congress to information about state executive officials, state legislatures, recall elections, ballot measures, and even local school boards.
• Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC) -- a non-profit organization that serves as a resource for grassroots advocates and uses the ballot measure process as a tool for achieving progressive policy goals and political gains.
• Campaign Finance Data -- produced by the Federal Elections Commission, this site contains a searchable database of reports and statements filed by political committees. View actual financial disclosure reports filed by House, Senate and Presidential campaigns, Parties and PACs from 1993 to the present.
• CQ Voting and Elections Collection -- integrates data, authoritative analysis, concise explanations, and historical material to provide comprehensive information on the American voter, major and minor political parties, campaigns and elections, and historical and modern races for Congress, the presidency, and governorships.
• ElectionGuide -- provides information on national elections, breaking news on election-related laws and political developments, and election results and voter turnout from around the world.
• Election Resources on the Internet -- this site provides detailed regional and international election statistics and otherr online international election resources.
• FactCheck.org -- this site monitors the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of television ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases to increase public knowledge and understanding.
• ICPSR -- archive of social science data covering a range of subject areas including population, economics, education, health, social and political behavior, crime, aging, and substance abuse. Note that USC users will need to create an account from on-campus to download data.
• PARLINE Database on National Parliaments -- contains information on the structure and working methods of 262 parliamentary chambers in all of the 187 countries where a national legislature exists.
• PolitiFact -- a project of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies that assesses factual truth in American politics. Reporters and editors from the Times fact-check statements by members of Congress, the White House, lobbyists, and interest groups and rate them on a "Truth-O-Meter."
• Project Vote Smart -- provides backgrounds and records of thousands of political candidates and elected offices to discover their voting records, campaign contributions, public statements, biographical data (including their work history) and evaluations of them generated by over 100 competing special interest groups.
• Psephos -- billed as largest, most comprehensive and most up-to-date archive of electoral information in the world, with election statistics from 176 countries. Use the alphabetical index at left to find information about every country in the world. The site looks cartoonish but contains good information.
• Voting America -- provides cinematic and interactive maps showing how Americans voted in presidential elections at the county level, from the beginning of the modern party system in 1840 to the present.

This information is listed in the Political Science Research Guide created by USC Librarian Robert Labaree, https://libguides.usc.edu/POSC. Descriptions of resources are adapted or quoted from vendor websites.