Local Elections in America Project (LEAP)

LEAP is a repository of local elections and other related data that are routinely gathered from publicly available sources, organized by geographic location and date, and stored in relational schemas. LEAP’s innovation is in creating a digital archive of past election results, as well as automating data collection for current and future elections increasing the efficiency and lowering the cost of the process. LEAP enables easy access and widespread dissemination of data via online tools, spatial reporting, and analysis of election results along with other city-level and Census-level indicators, and seamless connectivity to other databases.

What are LEAP’s objectives?

LEAP provides data and data services to researchers, educators, governments and other public and private sector organizations so they can learn about, analyze, and make informed decisions about local politics, elections, governance and public policy. LEAP seeks to develop the infrastructure to expand the scope of its data collection so that it can create new data schemas and conduct new data collection tasks to supplement existing data and meet the needs and demands of its constituents.

Our team is using the LEAP data to investigate research questions related to turnout, candidate emergence, and the representation of minorities and women in politics, elections, and governance.