Research Guides: L2 Political Academic Voter File: Access the data

Data Services

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Staffed Hours: Fall 2023
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Accessing L2 Political Data

To get access to the various data we have licensed from L2, please follow these steps:

Write a data management plan using our template. If you are an undergraduate student who is not working on a capstone project, skip this step and go to #2.
Agree to the terms of use L2 Political data is limited to use for personal academic research purposes only.
Wait for a reply from a member of Data Services with further instructions on how to access the data.

L2 Data Permissions

Different folks at NYU have different access to different products from L2 Political Data. Refer to the chart chart to understand to what you have access!

Table of permissions for L2 Political Data products at NYU.
Primary status at NYU	Full raw data	VoterMapping Interface	Anonymized sample
Undergraduate student	❌	❌	✅
Undergraduate student - completing a capstone	✅	✅	✅
Graduate student	✅	✅	✅
Staff	✅	✅	✅
Faculty	✅	✅	✅
Visiting scholar/scholar-in-residence	✅	✅	✅
Non-NYU collaborator	❌	❌	❌

Access instructions

VoterMapping Map Query Interface

Users who apply for access will receive an account with a unique username and password via email that can be used to sign in here: https://www.l2datamapping.com/account/login.

Complete Raw Data Files and Historical Processed and Raw Data Files

Users who apply for and are granted access will connect to a folder that contains state-by-state files, which include two tab separated value files (.tab) for each state that can be joined together by a unique identifier. Access to the files is provisioned via mountable storage in NYU's Research Workspace (RW). In order to access the raw data file, you will need to establish a connection to the mountable storage space that has been allocated to you on Research Workspace. In order to do this, refer to the following set of instructions. For off-campus access, you must use the VPN.

Please note that the specific navigation path to use when following the instructions is: smb://storage.rcs.nyu.edu/l2_political.

Derived Samples and Subsets

These are available to anyone with an NYU login. For example, see the random sample of voters in New York State in NYU's Spatial Data Repository.