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For Journalists

Local election data is where accountability stories live — and where data is hardest to find. These are the questions journalists ask, with real answers drawn from the dataset.

Closest races

  • Who won the closest race in America? Dawson County, GA had a tied contest at 25,186 total votes cast — decided by recount procedures, not by a single voter’s margin.
  • How many exact ties exist? 19 exact ties have been identified across available data. Each is flagged with the specific contest, county, and vote totals. See Closest Races in America.
  • Which school board races were decided by single digits? Madison County, IN had a school board race decided by 1 vote. These contests are queryable by margin across all office types.

Unopposed races

  • How many sheriffs ran unopposed? In North Carolina, 55% of sheriff races were uncontested. In Maine, 77%. National figures depend on source coverage — seven states lack local data entirely.
  • What’s the overall uncontested rate? 48.8% of local races in available data have a single candidate. This figure spans all office types and all states with coverage.
  • Which offices are most likely to be uncontested? Constable races are uncontested 72% of the time. City council races: 10%. The rate varies by office type and state. See Uncontested Race Rate by State.

Accountability angles

  • Who keeps winning without opposition? Candidate entity resolution across election cycles identifies incumbents who have never faced an opponent. See Career Tracking Across Elections.
  • Which counties have the most uncontested offices? County-level aggregation is possible wherever FIPS codes are present in the source data. See Sheriff Accountability.
  • Are there races where write-in candidates are the only opposition? Write-in totals are preserved where the source reports them. In some jurisdictions, write-in votes account for the only opposition in over a third of contests.

Verification

  • Can I verify a specific result? Every record traces back to a named source (e.g., NC SBE certified results, MEDSL). The pipeline preserves source file hashes and original field values. See Verify a Specific Result.
  • How do I cite this data? You cite the original source, not this project. The project provides the source name, retrieval date, and confidence level for each record. See Confidence Levels.

What you cannot get here (yet)

  • Turnout data is present in fewer than 5% of records.
  • Seven states (CA, IA, KS, NJ, PA, TN, WI) have zero local coverage in MEDSL 2022.
  • Odd-year elections (2015, 2017, 2019, 2021) are underrepresented.

These gaps are documented in Known Limitations. If you are reporting on a state with limited coverage, check the Coverage Matrix first.