L2 Political Academic Voter File

The L2 Political Academic Voter File is large and is divided into two parts per state: a voter demographic file and a voter history file. 

Extracting the .zip archives

The VM2-VOTER-HISTORY files are large, even when compressed, and users will often have difficulties decompressing the files. The reason is that these .zip files were created by PKZIP and the unzip binary in many macOS versions cannot uncompress that form. You will need to extract them.

NYU Libraries has created a Jupyter Notebook in order to load selected portions of the L2 Political files into memory, join them according to the common LALVOTERID identifier, and then derive a sample. This notebook assumes that users have downloaded the Anaconda Python distribution and have also installed the Pyjanitor package.