NDI Launches New Georgia Elections Data Website

In June 2021, NDI launched a new website - ElectionsData.ge - that presents the final results, voter turnout, and other data from every Georgian election since 2008. The site presents public election and voter data, generously provided to NDI by Georgia’s Central Election Commission, to allow Georgian and English-language users to explore, analyze, and present Georgian election data through maps, graphs and downloadable formats. 

For Georgia’s political parties and independent politicians, past election results data can guide their strategic decision-making by helping them understand where their supporters are, who they might be and what they care about. For Georgian civil society and activists, turnout and voter list data, especially when disaggregated by gender or age and available at the granular level of precincts and districts, can help identify low-turnout areas for “get out the vote” efforts or high-turnout areas for campaigning. 

This site also aligns with NDI’s global efforts to promote openness in government, including government data, so that citizens, civil society, and researchers can ensure public institutions are more transparent, responsive and accountable. In particular, this project aligns with NDI’s Open Election Data Initiative by sharing data in ways that make the election data freely and easily used, reused and redistributed by members of the general public. 

The site’s database includes Georgia’s presidential, parliamentary, municipal, and Adjaran supreme council elections since 2008, including last year’s parliamentary elections and the various interim and by-elections that take place between regular elections. 

Users can customize the website’s maps to suit their analysis. For example, where a specific political party is most popular or the turnout of women voters the greatest can be shown at each geographic level (national, district & precinct) through a “heat map,” a visualization technique that displays the variable’s magnitude through the progressive intensity of a selected color. If one heat map isn’t enough, users can compare two or more maps at the same time. 

NDI encourages everyone, in and outside of Georgia, to learn more about Georgia’s elections through this new interactive website. For researchers or those interested in parsing the election data in a more hands-on fashion, the site’s Data page provides Georgian and English-language downloads for each election in user-friendly XLS and comma-separated values (CSV) formats; if you only want to analyze certain variables, you can customize your dataset on the respective election’s page. 

NDI is actively introducing the tool to interested partners in politics and civil society in Georgia, who can leverage the data in order to target voter outreach or get out the vote efforts, and for other members of the public to conduct general research on election results and voter trends. 

NDI is a non-profit, non-partisan, non-governmental organization that works in partnership around the world to strengthen and safeguard democratic institutions, processes, norms and values to secure a better quality of life for all. NDI envisions a world where democracy and freedom prevail, with dignity for all.