MIvoter: Manual Entry of County Election Data

Charles Roth
Last update: 1/6/2026

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!

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.

However... (and this is the part where you come in) some of these reports are (a) difficult to automatically parse, and (b) very 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 county.  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, etc.
  2. We want only county-level offices or lower (cities, townships, villages, school boards).  We ignore state offices, including state house and senate (we already have that data from a single source).
  3. If there were 3 candidates in a contest, we want the data for all 3, not just the winner.
  4. 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).  Or you can even use a simple text editor, like Notepad, and just type in the data, separated by tabs (the tab key).

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:

The data that we want would look like this (Alger is county #2): 

#yyyy-mm-dd  county#   title                                   voteFor#   candidateName     partyName   #votes
2023-11-07         2   City Commissioner for City of Munising    1        Jordan S. Prunic        ?     200
The first line 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.  (When you save the data as a CSV/TSV file, the fields are separated by the 'tab' character.)

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

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

The end result: save it in a CSV/TSV file.  Please 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.)  Then send it to wchasroth@gmail.com.

The files that we need to manually enter are listed at manual-list.  If you do any of these files, please let us know at the above email address, ASAP, so that no-one duplicates your work.

The list will be updated as we go, and more counties will probably be added.

IV. County Numbers