Talk:Libertarian Party of California Historical Election Results
Still need Board of Equalization results from 1998 and earlier.
Note: Percentages in official Statement of Vote for some years are rounded incorrectly. The 2002 report doesn't even have the precision indicated correctly (e.g., they rounded 3.87% down to 3.8% and then showed it as "3.80%"!).
JWD3 (talk) 15:29, 13 February 2018 (CST)
Sources
Anybody know where the numbers (vote counts and percentages) came from for the initial population of these tables (around April 2017)? JWD3 (talk) 10:07, 24 February 2018 (CST)
- I know the source for about 99% of the election results on LPedia (every state). When I started the California page (in June 2016), it was only federal data. I used the election results from the FEC and the Clerk of the US House. I used them interchangeably, but they will sometimes differ slightly (and may differ slightly from how the state of California reports them, although all three claim to be official certified results). Every source, even official ones, has mistakes.
- If you were looking for pre-1990 Statements of Vote issued by the state of California, most of them can be found here (a few are missing): http://archive.org/search.php?query=california%20statement%20of%20the%20vote
- The few elections that are not in those sources (or the more modern Statements of Vote on the Secretary of State's web site) either came from Our Campaigns (http://www.ourcampaigns.com/ContainerDetail.html?ContainerID=1), archived versions of LP.org, old issues of LP News, or the Richard Winger Vote Total Archive. Of those, LP News is the least reliable, followed by LP.org, followed by ourcampaigns. The Richard Winger data is the most reliable of the unofficial sources. AJPEG (talk) 18:02, 24 February 2018 (CST)
OK -- the reason I asked is that I have been looking at the Statements of Vote for some details of the races in Santa Clara County, and I am finding some differences from what you posted. Not a lot of them, but enough that I thought it worth checking. Differences could either be due to mistakes in transferring from an official source to one of those secondary sources that you used -- or it could be that there was a correction of some kind later in time (so that the original official source, though "official", is no longer the latest official source). However, in the cases I have run into so far, the differences can be very easily explained as transcription errors. Given that, and the fact that it sounds like you were mostly using secondary sources, I am going to assume that it is the number from the Statement of Vote that is the correct one, and update the page accordingly. But if you have some specific evidence that the Statement of Vote number was later corrected in these particular cases, please feel free to change them back -- with some sort of note here explaining why so they don't get corrected back again.
Primary Results
Might want to consider moving the primary results to a different page. It could get confusing as primary results from the candidates who advanced to the general are included. AJPEG (talk) 20:30, 23 February 2018 (CST)
- The Primary results listed on this page are just for the cases, from 2012 and later, where the Libertarian did NOT advance to the General Election. Which is almost all of the cases where a Libertarian ran for one of these offices in those years. (And the few who did advance are already listed in the normal way.) The reason they are here is because, under this system, the Primary was the last (and only) chance that the Libertarian was presented to the voters of the district in question. Under this system, it was all the voters of the district who had a chance to vote or not vote Libertarian in the Primary, just like in a General Election. Of course it's not exactly the same as a General Election, since there will usually have been a larger number of candidates overall, so they are marked differently. But as a test of how large a portion of the voting population is willing to "Vote Libertarian", it's similar -- and it's the best we've got for those districts in those years. A new page for all the Primary results would be fine, if somebody wants to do that. And on such a page I would expect all the Libertarians who ran in the Primary to be listed, whether they advanced to the General Election or not (but perhaps with some notation indicating which ones did). JWD3 (talk) 22:40, 23 February 2018 (CST)
Races with more than 2 candidates
Look into the primary results for these: