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the rest, I did not have alternatives: I had to take pictures of the ballots. The problem is
that not every single ballot of the last 25 years is stored in one place. A substantive
proportion of them (about a 60%) were available in the Archives of the National
Electoral Courts, the office of the judicial branch that oversees that every candidate to
national-level office fulfills all the legal requirements. Despite they do not rule over
subnational positions, the structure of the ballot in Argentina made my task easier. As it
can be seen in Figure 4.1, party ballots have candidacies for multiple offices attached
when those elections are concurrent. Thus, the official records of the national legislative
elections included a considerable proportion of the data I needed. I took about 12.000
pictures of these ballots and complemented the sample with pictures of ballots stored in
the mentioned archive at the National Electoral Direction.
After having taken all the pictures, I still lacked data for several elections. In
order to fill the blanks, I have browsed provincial newspapers in dates close to the
elections. Doing so, I got most of the data I needed. For the remaining missing
observations, I contacted specialists in the provinces, and also used Google. These
complementary sources also helped me collect other kinds of useful data, such as the
identification of relatives that have occupied the same executive position across time27.
Four months after the starting date, I had gathered the information about a 100% of the
gubernatorial candidates and a 90% of the mayoral candidates in Argentina between
1983 and 2008. Most of the missing information has to do with the existence of the so
called "Ley de Lemas" (double simultaneous cumulative vote, see Tula 1998) in some
provinces, where more than one candidate per party could run for a specific position.
27 It was necessary to confirm whether people with the same last name were actually relatives; in some
other cases, spouses of past officers did not use the same last name as their couples, which involved an
additional effort. Something similar can be said about uncles-nephews.