State Election Law Volume Assessment tool (SELVA)

The State Election Litigation Volume Assessment (SELVA) is a first-of-its-kind tool for measuring and visualizing the volume of election litigation in the United States. The ELP analyzed dockets to create a living database of federal court election litigation in fifty states and state court litigation in thirty-eight, from routine election matters that fly under the radar to disputes that make national news. SELVA users can use the site to compare election litigation volume across different years (single and multi-year ranges), states, and across state and federal courts. Users can then download the resulting color map and graph visualizations.

Click here for more information on the specific process to create and update the SELVA project’s dataset, as well as the project’s limitations.

The State Election Litigation Volume Assessment (SELVA) project uses docket data purchased from Docket Alarm (a vLex-FastCase product), which relies on publicly available court records. The quality and available quantity of court docket information vary widely from state to state, and the SELVA data reflects this reality. Additionally, even if docket data are available from a state, that state may not make underlying documents available, nor enough information on a given case to determine if it involves an election law dispute (and should thus be included or excluded from this data set). Some examples:

• Indiana has publicly available data for every county and appellate court to provide examples of state variation.
• Wyoming only makes its appellate court docket data available.
• Alabama does not make any state court dockets available to the public.
• Under the supervision and direction of the ELP’s program manager, William & Mary law students determine if a case is an election law matter. They do so by reviewing the court filings available for that case docket, third-party sources, local journalists' reporting, and press releases related to that docket item.

If you notice an erroneously included (or excluded) docket entry in the downloadable data set, please email ebenchbook@wm.edu with the case name, docket number, and the identified error.

Q: Can I download the data behind the map?
A: Not at this time; we are determining the amount of information that we can make available in accordance with Docket Alarm's Terms of Service.