Wake County, North Carolina
Voter data is public. That does not make it usable.
Making civic data accessible, understandable, and actionable for everyone who cares about democracy.
Why this exists
Democracy works better when citizens understand it. Voter registration and turnout are public information in North Carolina, but they arrive as raw files that only specialists can interpret: fixed-width exports, undocumented codes, and boundaries that changed two redistricting cycles ago.
VoteIQ reads those official files and publishes what they say, as counts and percentages, for every district in Wake County. Whether you are a resident wondering how your precinct actually votes, a local journalist checking a claim, a civic organization planning outreach, or a researcher who needs the real numbers, the data should be readable without a statistics degree.
Focusing on one county lets us go deep instead of wide. Wake is North Carolina’s most populous county and home to the state capital, and we would rather cover it precinct by precinct than cover a hundred counties shallowly.
What we hold ourselves to
Official and public record
Every registration and turnout number traces to a file published by an election board. We document each source and link it. Where a figure is a modeled estimate rather than a count, we label it as modeled, every time it appears.
Transparency
Our sources and our methods are written down and public. If you want to check our work, you can: download the same file we did, and the numbers should match.
Accessibility
Complex data should be legible to everyone, not just researchers. Every chart on this site is backed by the same numbers in plain text, the pages work on a phone, and they work before the JavaScript loads.
How we handle the data
Processing
We clean and standardize the raw files: consistent party and race codes, current district boundaries, deduplicated history. Personally identifying details never reach a public page. The public site is served by a database account that cannot read voter-level records at all, so aggregation is enforced by the architecture rather than by good intentions.
Suppression
Small groups are suppressed. If a precinct has fewer than ten voters in a category, we show that it is suppressed instead of printing a number that could identify someone.
Statistics
Turnout is the share of registered voters who cast a ballot. Demographic breakdowns use the official registration categories, exactly as recorded. During an election we report cumulative ballots cast, never outcomes, and we never project who wins.
Visualization
Charts are drawn to represent the data accurately. No truncated axes, no scaling tricks, no color chosen to make a trend look bigger than it is. Color marks a category, not an opinion.
Updates
Every morning at about 7 AM during early voting, weekly on Saturdays off season. Earlier weeks are preserved so you can compare any two of them and see what actually changed.
For how the modeled heritage estimates work and where they stop being reliable, see the methodology page.
Where the data comes from
All of it comes from official public sources. We think you should always know where a number originated, so here is the full list.
Registration files, turnout, and the daily early-vote file
Statewide voter and vote-history records, candidate filings
Address geocoding, and block-group statistics used only inside our models
Common questions
How often is the data updated?
During early voting, every morning at about 7 AM, from the Wake County Board of Elections daily file. Off season, weekly on Saturdays from the NC State Board of Elections file. Past weeks are kept, so you can compare any two of them.
Where does the data come from, and is it official?
Every registration and turnout figure on this site traces to an official public record from the county or state election board. Census data is used to place addresses on a map and inside our own models; no Census figure appears in any count you see here. We do not survey, we do not poll, and we do not estimate turnout from samples. The sources are listed above and linked so you can check any number yourself.
Can I get the underlying data?
The original files are public and you can download them straight from the sources linked above. A packaged VoteIQ export is on the roadmap and is not available yet.
Why only Wake County?
Because depth beats breadth. Wake is North Carolina's most populous county and home to the state capital, and covering one county properly means precinct-level detail, real turnout history, and boundaries we can verify. Local civic data deserves the same rigor national coverage gets.
Get in touch
Found a number that looks wrong? Writing a story and need the underlying figures? Want a district we do not cover yet? We read everything.
Send us a messageBuilding a campaign? VoteIQ has a separate toolset for verified candidates. Eligibility and terms apply. See what candidates get.