American Antiquarian Society Voting Records

Philip J. Lampi (born 1944 in Fitchburg, Massachusetts) is a scholar and historian. His career has been defined by his ground-breaking work reassembling records of early American election returns. He is currently employed as a researcher at the American Antiquarian Society(AAS) in Worcester, Massachusetts. The AAS, Tufts University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities collaborated on the project "A New Nation Votes," a digital record of Lampi’s work.

As a child, Lampi became fascinated with election returns, and noticed that the data stopped at 1825. He decided to find the missing facts and figures. And so began a lifelong quest, with Lampi crisscrossing the nation in search of state archives, historical societies, newspaper collections, compendia of letters, and biographies holding records of how Americans voted when the Constitution was still young.

The A New Nation Votes website makes public and searchable what, until now, could only be found in Lampi’s loose-leaf notebooks: a comprehensive record of early American election returns from 1787 to 1825.