Coverage
The engine, state by state.
Each state gets its own deltas, its own ladder, and its own ledger — because no two of them publish alike. 48 on the board; the other 2 arrive by structural family.
Alabama
Sixty-seven probate judges run the vote, 541 appointed boards never face it, and four districts voted twice — the do-over came without a runoff.
AKAlaska
No county in Alaska runs a state election. The Division of Elections runs all of them, publishes the register by House district and precinct rather than by borough, and even administers the school-board elections — because most of the state's schools sit in an unorganized borough with no local government to run them.
AZArizona
Fifteen counties publish election results fifteen different ways, through four vendors and one raw PDF. One of them holds fifty-nine percent of the electorate, and the largest bloc in the state is a category the state calls Other.
ARArkansas
Everything from governor to constable rides one gubernatorial-year ballot — the judges were picked back in March, and the state board can fire your county's election commission.
CACalifornia
California is the only state so far that publishes how many people could register alongside how many did — 27,253,826 eligible against 23,155,447 registered. Eighty-five percent statewide, and anywhere from fifty-seven to ninety-six by county.
COColorado
Half the electorate belongs to no party at all, and 3,201 of the state's 3,715 local governments are special districts. Colorado is mostly districts, governed mostly by people who declined to pick a side.
CTConnecticut
Connecticut abolished county government in 1960, and in 2022 the Census went further and retired the counties as a geography, replacing all eight with nine Planning Regions. The state's own voter file did not get the memo: it still sorts all 169 towns under the counties that no longer exist in either sense.
DEDelaware
Three counties, one state-run feed, 57 municipal charters on their own calendars — and a constitution the voters have never once ratified.
FLFlorida
67 counties, 67 elected election chiefs, 1,095 districts elected by the acre — and a congressional map that is three months old.
GAGeorgia
159 counties, seven of them governed by one person, an election with a December overtime date — and certification the courts made ministerial, twice.
HIHawaii
Hawaii has twenty-one local governments in the entire state — three counties, one city, seventeen districts, and not a single school board. It also elects an office no other state has: nine trustees of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, chosen statewide, whose electorate was legally a different set of people from the state's own until the Supreme Court ended that in 2000.
IDIdaho
Idaho publishes the number every other state argues about: registration at the cutoff, election-day registrants, and the total, as three separate columns. Statewide that gap is 11,087 voters. In Minidoka County it is nearly a fifth of the roll.
ILIllinois
102 counties, 108 election authorities, 6,930 units of government — the deepest overlap stack in the country, in a state that publishes nothing on election night.
INIndiana
92 counties, 5,147 precincts, a township government under every address — and a statewide ballot that was finished at conventions, not the primary.
IAIowa
A five-way primary for an open governorship came within three points of being handed to a party convention. Iowa's rule is that if nobody clears thirty-five percent, the primary is inconclusive and the nomination moves off the ballot entirely.
KSKansas
105 counties — 103 governments — 4,141 precincts, and a primary that just settled how Kansas picks its judges.
KYKentucky
Three constitutional clocks, one courthouse midterm — every county office in the state elects this November, and the results will arrive as a hundred and twenty PDFs.
LALouisiana
The jungle primary ended here in January and came halfway back in May — a sitting senator lost renomination under the new rules, and the House races that were pulled from the ballot had their votes voided.
MEMaine
Maine registers voters in eighteen places that have no municipal government at all, runs a form of government called a plantation that exists almost nowhere else, and has a fully ballot-qualified Green Independent Party with thirty thousand members — while insisting, correctly, that there is no Independent party in Maine.
MDMaryland
Twenty-three counties and one city that belongs to none of them, delegates elected three at a time, judges on three different ballots — and results that take weeks on purpose.
MAMassachusetts
Massachusetts abolished nine of its fourteen county governments and kept electing the county officers anyway. Underneath that, 351 cities and towns cover every square foot of the state with no unincorporated land at all — so the town is not the bottom of the ladder here, it is the whole ladder.
MIMichigan
Michigan publishes something almost no other state does: which voting machine every one of its 4,340 precincts uses, by county, with the registered and active voters attached to each. Three vendors divide the state, nine counties run two at once, and Wayne County alone is split between them.
MNMinnesota
87 counties, 4,106 precincts, a House tied 67–67 — and every seat in the legislature on one November ballot, with both marquee offices open.
MSMississippi
The state that elects its government in odd years — 2026 belongs to the trial bench, a Supreme Court race stranded in court, and a Senate race with no portal to watch it on.
MOMissouri
114 counties, a city in no county at all, 116 election authorities — and a congressional map still in court three months before the election.
MTMontana
Fifty-six counties administer elections in a state the Census credits with fifty-four. Nine of them count every ballot by hand, and the other forty-seven all buy from the same vendor.
NENebraska
Two hundred eighty-three state-level contests are on this ballot and ten of them are partisan. The Legislature is nonpartisan, the Public Service Commission is not, and the largest elected structure in the state is twenty-three river basins that fit inside no county.
NJNew Jersey
Every acre of New Jersey sits inside one of 564 municipalities — there is no unincorporated ground to fall back on. And because unaffiliated voters can join a party at the primary polls, the state's own register shows 16,360 of them doing exactly that in the eight weeks after June 2.
NMNew Mexico
New Mexico opened its primary to voters in no party, counted 390,218 of them as eligible, and published the number of ballots they cast on that line: zero. The turnout rate divides by all of them anyway.
NYNew York
62 counties, 58 election boards, four ballot lines deep in fusion — and a local calendar that just moved onto this November's ballot for the first time.
NCNorth Carolina
100 counties that count and one state that publishes — plus an appointed election chain of command, judges with party labels, and the Senate race the whole country is watching.
NDNorth Dakota
There is no voter registration here — the only state without it — so turnout has no denominator of its own. The state divides ballots cast by a Census Bureau estimate of everyone eighteen and older, and one county came out at 98.21%.
OHOhio
88 counties, 8,868 precincts, and a statewide feed that is never the official record — certified May 26, re-armed for November 3.
OKOklahoma
One board appoints every county's election secretary, one device counts every ballot, one feed reports every race — and half the statewide offices are open at once.
OROregon
Oregon's registration table has a column for Non-Affiliated and a separate column for a party called Independent. The first holds 1,142,360 people and the second 153,045, and treating them as the same thing is the single easiest mistake to make in this state.
PAPennsylvania
67 counties, 2,559 municipalities tiling every acre, 4,851 governments — and a November ballot kept thin by constitutional design.
RIRhode Island
Rhode Island has thirty-nine cities and towns, five counties that govern nothing, and one hundred and twenty-seven local governments in the entire state. In 2024 it also counted 10,957 ballots from voters who are registered in none of its municipalities — they hold a ballot and no row in the register.
SCSouth Carolina
Forty-six counties on one feed, judges elected by the legislature instead of you, a runoff clock that runs to August 25 — and a Senate seat remade by a death in July.
SDSouth Dakota
Nobody cleared thirty-five percent on June 2, so the top two came back eight weeks later. The state's own results page still has the July 28 runoff filed under the word “Primary.”
TNTennessee
Ninety-five counties that vote on Thursdays, a ballot that's half general and half primary, one statewide office you can actually vote for — and a congressional map that was ninety days old on primary day.
TXTexas
254 counties, 5,533 governments, a runoff that just unseated a 24-year senator — and the map that started the national wave, settled by summary reversal.
UTUtah
Utah publishes a column asking whether each county's ballots reconcile — and when they do not, the county's own written explanation. In the 2024 general, seventeen of twenty-nine said no, and every one said why.
VTVermont
Vermont has 522,600 registered voters and a voting-age population of 528,077 — it has registered ninety-nine percent of the adults who live here. Then it publishes that turnout three different ways, in two files from the same office, and gets three different answers.
VAVirginia
Three constitutional amendments reach the ballot on November 3. A fourth already failed — the Supreme Court of Virginia nullified an April referendum for defective process, but the same bills had moved the primary out of June, and that part stuck.
WAWashington
Washington publishes its electorate by age, by gender, by congressional district and by city — and never by party, because party registration does not exist here. What it does publish is forty-five years of turnout, and the even years draw twice the odd ones.
WVWest Virginia
The judges and school boards were done by May, the executive rides 2028, and the canvass doesn't even start until the fifth day.
WIWisconsin
72 counties, 1,851 municipal clerks, 7,161 wards that report as 3,603 units — and two complete election calendars running side by side.
WYWyoming
Voters already registered had to lock their party by May 13. Anyone registering for the first time can pick one at the polling place on primary day. Same ballot, same voter, two entirely different rules.
Below the state: Wayne County and the City of Wayne show the county and jurisdiction levels.