A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns, 1787‐1825

Americans are just exulting in the end of a long election season when we became sated with polls and statistics. But a couple of hundred years ago, the statistics were not that easy to come by. And they might have disappeared, or at least been unavailable to all but the most persistent of scholars except for one man. Philip Lampi had an obsession with collecting election results. A 2007 New Yorker article describes his journey as “one of the strangest and most heroic tales in the annals of American historical research”. In 1960 he started compiling lists of election results...