About Skipjack

Skipjack transforms Maryland election data from scattered government PDFs and spreadsheets into clean, explorable datasets. Named after Maryland's state boat — the Chesapeake Bay skipjack — the project aims to make election data navigable and traceable. Questions? Email Derek Willis at dpwillis@umd.edu.

Data Sources

All data comes from official government sources. Every number on this site traces back to its original source document through our provenance system.

The turnout pages read the State Board's press-room reports, one snapshot per day each file is changed.

The results pages read the State Board's county results CSV files, one per county and party file. They are not listed one by one here; each election's files are on the Board's election data page for its year, and every file's source link is in its provenance sidecar on the data page.

Methodology

Original files are downloaded from the Maryland State Board of Elections and stored as-is in an archive with SHA-256 checksums. Each file is then parsed into structured CSV format with a provenance sidecar recording the source, parse date, and parser version. The CSVs are loaded into a SQLite database for fast querying by the web application. Each report is checked against its own printed totals; the reports that do not add up are listed on the errata page.

License

This project is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0). You are free to share and adapt the data with attribution.