Electoral Data on the TSE site
The Tribunal Superior Eleitoral has at their [site](http://www.tse.gov.br/) electoral data for elections at the local and national level since 1994. Despite the data being archived in the horrible Microsoft Access format, it is very easy to extract and manipulate it in your program of choice.
Unfortunately they moved to a web only service since the 2002 elections, making it much harder to get all the data. We emailed them recently and fortunately enough they still use internally MS Acess, and were kind enough to send us a cd-rom with the data. It is a huge file, and I am still working out the wrinkles before I post a processed version in our data section. Nevertheless, if someone needs it before them, just email me and we can arrange something. I cannot post the access files before we move to a new server, since it is a 122mb zip file! If you want to donate to this noble cause (our own server account), click on the donate button in the side bar. You will have our most sincere thanks… and plenty of bandwidth and storage for Brazilian political data!
[Incidentally, I would like to add that the site is going well. We had more than 500 unique visitors in October, and we already show up as the first link if you [google brazilian politics](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=brazilian+politics&btnG=Google+Search)! ]
On the other hand, although (very) buggy, the web tools are kind of neat. If you haven’t checked it out already, look at maps and text reports about the distribution of votes for the winning candidates across each state [here](http://www.tse.gov.br/partidos/principal.html) (see a screenshot below). You can play around with the layers and colors interactively (they use Adobe’s implementation of a new graphic format called svg. You have to download the viewer here
to use the tools.
They also have now electoral data at the “zona eleitoral” (electoral subdivision of municipalities) level, but I don’t have the data base for it yet. Anyway, very cool if you want to explore the electoral patterns for specific candidates with no gis knowledge required.