Table 1 The extent of the data about different types of races.

Race type	Precincts 2020	Candidates 2020	Precincts 2018	Candidates 2018	Precincts 2016	Candidates 2016
President	176,618	536	—	—	182,669	801
US Senate	74,181	192	132,926	385	140,657	223
US House	171,476	1,830	172,874	1,487	155,787	1,356
Governors/Lt. Governors	12,923	324	139,103	781	22,887	87
State senates	102,180	5,477	85,839	2,961	90,492	2,146
State houses	166,599	12,491	155,634	9,647	128,877	7,669
Judicial races	64,287	2,151	74,639	5,296	69,672	1,727
Other state-wide races	48,024	1,074	120,528	1,354	141,726	12,277
Local races	9,168	1,129	138,195	27,165	44,748	15,627
Ballot questions	90,034	—	85,681	—	84,553	—
Meta-information	77,953	—	75,818	—	5,618	—

The figures for President, US Senate, US House, governors, state senates, and state houses are precise counts. The other figures are not exact because they concern too many millions of rows, with thousands of unique custom descriptions of ballot questions or races at regional and local levels, but they are estimates based on a combination of string searches and manually classifying the descriptions of the race provided by each state. Large variations between years in some offices partly reflect real differences in how much information our data contains for each office across the different years, but are also partly attributable to data being reported in quite different ways in different years, with some states for example splitting the same amount of information into more precincts in one year than in another. States sometimes report ballots in aggregations that are not exactly geographic precincts, and we retain that information, so these figures are somewhat larger than the number of literal geographic precincts; for example, some counties report all of their absentee ballots as though they correspond to an “absentee ballot precinct”, and we retain that fictitious precinct alongside geographic precincts.

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