The vote validation data were gathered in the spring and summer of 1977, through interviews with election registration officials and from examination of voting records of the respondents participating in these election studies. The collection also includes filter variables that allow for the retrieval of each of the distinct panel and cross-section samples. They are based on multistage representative cross-section samples of citizens of voting age, living in private households. Each study contains information from interviews conducted with 1,000 to 2,000 respondents. Interviewing is conducted before and after presidential elections and after occasional congressional elections.
Interviews range from one to three hours in length.
Many questions are replicated across studies, although each has questions not asked in the others. Consequently, the frequency distribution for certain variables will differ slightly between the 1976 cross-section study and this version of the data. Vote validation frequencies were generated using V764008 as a weight and filter. The PDF file format was developed by Adobe Systems Incorporated and can be accessed using PDF reader software, such as the Adobe Acrobat Reader. All citizens of voting age residing in households in the coterminous United States.