What do zero, N/A, blanks, not categorized, and unknown mean as used in the Election Administration and Voting Survey reports?
States have a number of options for reporting data for the various questions and sub-questions. The 2008 survey instrument instructed states to enter “N/A” if data were not available or if a question was not applicable to a state or county. If a state entered a zero, that response was treated as a valid response equaling zero (“0”). A “blank” response was treated as a nonresponse. The Notes section for the tables, which appears in each report, explains the Balance/Not Categorized column. The Balance/Not Categorized column compares the sum of all the response columns with the total column. For example, in Table 40 of the Election Administration and Voting Survey report, the total number of poll workers is 878,360. The age categories listed in the columns adds up to 379,926, which means there is an uncharacterized balance of 498,434 poll workers whose ages are not known.
