L2 Political Academic Voter File

NYU Libraries has licensed access to the L2 Political Academic Voter File. The file is a continuously updated dataset consisting of public information for every registered voter in the United States and includes basic socio-demographic indicators (some of which are modeled), consumer preferences, political party affiliation, voting history, and more.

The data consists of .tab files organized into individual state folders (all states and DC). Each state folder contains two files: demographics data and voter history data, with a data dictionary for each dataset. The size of the folders vary by state and data for all states adds up to approximately 40 GB. The data is organized into releases, generally two per year (spring and fall), which represent a snapshot of the country's voters at the time of the dataset creation.

NYU has also licensed access to L2 Political historical backlog of data. This backlog includes versions of the L2 Processed voter file going back to 2008 (for most U.S. states) and unprocessed "raw" state voter rolls, also going back to 2008 for most U.S. states.

This collection is available to NYU faculty and students only, and requires user to first submit a data management plan to account for how access and storage of the data will be handled. Information on how to submit a request to use this data and create a data management plan is available at https://guides.nyu.edu/l2political.