MIvoter: Manual Entry of County Election Data

Charles Roth
Last update: 2/6/2026

I. Introduction and Purpose

The primary goal of MIvoter.org is to encourage more people to vote for Democratically-endorsed candidates (especially in "non-partisan" elections).

Secondarily, we provide contact & other information about all of each voter's elected officials -- from top to bottom, Governor to (metaphorical) dog-catcher.  There is no central database of all elected officials in Michigan.  So -- we're building it!

(This information is also really useful come election time.  It means we know which offices will have elections -- and which previous races were won by how many votes.  This is extremely useful strategic information for the Democratic party as a whole.)

In order to do this, we are "scraping" the data from each county's election results site(s).  Most of this is automated; we have a small pool of volunteers writing software to parse and import the (many different formats of) county election data.  We already have 60+% of the data automatically imported, with more to come.

However... (and this is the part where you come in) some of these reports are (a) difficult to automatically parse, and (b) small.  Such as an odd-numbered year election that had a single contest.

In these cases, we're looking for a few volunteers to manually enter the data.

II. The data we want

We are gathering the data for each general (November) election, for the years 2020 - 2025, for each of the 83 Michigan counties.  That's about 500 files, total.

For each contest (aka race), we want to end up with a spreadsheet that looks like the below.  (The fields are actually separated by tab characters -- the 'tab' key on your keyboard, shown here as 'large' spaces.) 

   yyyy-mm-dd   county#   title   voteFor#   candidateName   partyName   #votes
where Notes:
  1. We want only candidate races.  We ignore proposals, referenda, millages, etc.
  2. We want only county-level offices or lower (cities, townships, villages, school boards, community college boards).  We ignore state offices, including state house and senate (we already have that data from a single source).  We ignore all judicial offices as well (already have that data).
  3. If there were 3 candidates in a contest, we want the data for all 3, not just the winner.
  4. If there were write-in candidates or numbers, ignore them unless they (a) actually won, or (b) are a substantial fraction of the total votes (say 20%).  It's rare, but it happens occasionally.
  5. A "tab-separated spreadsheet" is sometimes known as "CSV" or "TSV".  You can use any spreadsheet tool (Excel, OpenOffice, etc.), and just tell it to save the file as a CSV or TSV, with tabs as the separator (not commas). 

III. The data we have

Here's an example of a small-but-hard-to-parse election report: Alger County Nov 7, 2023.

The relevant part looks like this:

There's a lot of stuff in the above.  What we're looking for is

Everything else is irrelvant!  So the idea is to translate the above into a spreadsheet, like this: 

#yyyy-mm-dd  county#   title                                   voteFor#   candidateName     partyName   #votes
2023-11-07         2   City Commissioner for City of Munising    1        Jordan S. Prunick        ?     200
The first row just shows the field or column names, and the "#" at the start means this is a 'comment' line, which will be ignored by our software.  The second line is the actual data for the (in this case one) candidate.  (When you save the data as a CSV/TSV file, the fields are separated by the 'tab' character.)

Make sure to enter one complete row per candidate.  We want all of the candidates, not just the winner.  (Write-ins should be ignored, unless they have a substantial number of votes -- say 20% or more.)

That's it!  This contest has only 1 person, but if there were more, each candidate would get their own row.

IV. How to Do It

You can download a template spreadsheet, that has (just) the first comment line with the field names, and use that to start with.

The files that we need to manually enter are listed at manual-list.  Start by emailing Charles, who will then give you access to it. 

Then pick one, put your name and date in the spreadsheet (so that no-one else picks it), download the PDF file, and have at it! 

When you're done, save it as a TSV (aka CSV, but tab-separated) file.  Give the file a very specific name, that includes the county name and the year, e.g. alger-2023.  (Please don't put spaces in the filename.)  Email the result to Charles.

V. County Numbers

(The name of the file that you download starts with the county number -- but here's the whole list, just in case.)