Organizational History
The Elections Research Center was established in 1955 as a branch of the Governmental Affairs Institute, a nonprofit research and survey organization founded in 1950. After receiving a grant from the Stern Family Fund, then Chairman of the Board, Edward Litchfield, invited noted political scientist, Richard M. Scammon, to head the Institute’s newly formed Elections Office, later known as the Elections Research Center. The Elections Research Center operated under Scammon’s direction for thirty years, collecting elections data from each state at the municipal, state, and federal level and publishing several comprehensive analyses of American voting trends and statistics. Using the data collected, the Center published its biennial series, America Votes, first released in 1956 and thereafter each general election, which systematically reported voting returns by state. Other works edited by Scammon, with assistance from his collaborator, Alice B. McGillivray, under the auspices of the Elections Research Center include Southern Primaries 58 (1959), America at the Polls: A Handbook of American Presidential and Election Statistics, 1920-1964(1965), and America at the Polls: A Handbook of American Presidential and Election Statistics, 1968-1984 (1988). The Elections Research Center closed in 1995.