United States Historical Election Returns, 1788-1823

This data collection contains general election returns for the offices of president, governor, and United States representative in the period 1788-1823. These returns comprise an extension of the general election collection (see UNITED STATES HISTORICAL ELECTION RETURNS, 1824-1968--ICPSR 0001) back to the occurrence of the first elections held under the United States Constitution. The data are recorded chiefly at the county level, although town-level returns were collected and preserved as well for the New England states. This collection of Early National period election returns is much less complete than the body of returns available for the years from 1824 to the present. Fugitive and nonextant sources resulted in the recovery of only approximately half of the possible returns for elections in this period. The collection and processing of the pre-1824 election materials was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.