In a democracy, the polling booth is much more than a location where an unwitting citizen fills in a bubble on a piece of paper in a make-shift booth. It is a symbol of the promise of democracy, a connector between the citizen and the government. It is the shrine that, if protected and respected, powers a democracy. This article analyzes that symbol of American democracy by taking an analytical look at a dataset of U.

The purpose of this script is to load and clean all of the various .csv files containing polling place data into R. The data, which is available for download here, is structured as follows: - Each state (32 in total) has its own folder - Within each state (folder), there are a variable number of CSV files, one for each year that polling place data is available