Talk:1930 United States House of Representatives elections

Latest comment: 4 years ago by Ariostos in topic Note On The Vote Numbers

Note On The Vote Numbers

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So one the one hand, with the current version, the popular vote numbers are actually backwards. That I could fix in short order, but it seems as if the information on the PDF itself is also wrought with what I will call "inconsistencies". In checking the data for Pennsylvania I noticed that actual Republican vote was off by (-70,395), the actual Democratic vote was off by (+61,750), the actual Socialist vote was off by (+330), and the "Others" are off by (-9,234). I suspected it might have been the Clerk having recorded the Party vote on a different basis (by Party in the case of Fusion Candidates) , but I have no way in which to check that, and other States like California seem to have followed the standard rule of allotting to the candidate's Party, nor does it explain why I'm missing (405) votes off the total. Really bizarre.
Also the At-Large elections in Illinois were left out of the math involved as well. --Ariostos (talk) 20:41, 9 April 2020 (UTC)Reply
Just for Transparency; the current data that I am working with is coming from the various PDFs you can find on history.house.gov as listed here. Looking at the PDF for any given year I then tally the votes by Party, by State, and from there I get the totals that I've placed in the infobox. There are two concerns I have with these numbers however. The first are the At-Large Districts, in which case I have adopted the rule that the highest number of votes in the State (either the total of the Party's candidates among all the #'d Districts, or the top At-Large candidate) represents the Party's vote in that State, akin to how we represent the vote for Presidential elections when voters were asked to vote for the Electors individually. The only problem with that method currently is that the PDF's don't list the total vote in any given race, and as the At-Large races have multiple seats with the voters voting multiple times, it isn't possible to discern a hard total. The second is that the Party loyalties of some candidates are not particularly clear. Normally I would be able to check them against other sources available to me but given the present closures of the libraries, well that isn't an option. Chances are though that I will have to revisit some of these numbers and adjust them at a later date, possibly two months time given current trends. --Ariostos (talk) 20:58, 9 April 2020 (UTC)Reply