I present the following as an FYI for those who are into this sort of thing (you know who you are). Greg posted a couple of days back that precinct-level data was now available statewide for all elections from 1996 through 2004 via FTP. You can use anonymous FTP, but for some reason, you actually have to enter “none” as the password. I always thought anonymous FTP meant a blank password, but apparently not in this case.
Anyway. The data is in lovely CSV format (woo hoo!), though it’s too big to bring up in Excel – I’m importing it all into Access for most of what I want to do, with some Perl scripting in reserve for anything that won’t succumb to my query-writing skills. Look for some wonky number crunching in the (hopefully) near future.
Meh.
You can say I’m never satisfied, but they used to have data going back into the 1980s.
Where’d it go?
My experience with anonymous ftp has always been that they request (but often don’t demand) your e-mail address.
But it’s been a few years since I actually had to ftp anything anonymously.