Massachusetts

Five of fourteen counties retain a county government. The other nine were dissolved into the Commonwealth — and yet a Clerk of Courts was elected in thirteen counties in 2024, seven of which have no county government to belong to. The office outlived the government. Any model that hangs elected offices off a parent jurisdiction has nowhere to attach seven of those thirteen, and any model that infers the existence of a county government from the presence of a county-wide elected office will invent nine that do not exist.

351 cities and towns tile the entire Commonwealth with no gaps. There is no territory that belongs only to a county, and therefore no residual role for a county to play. Pipelines built on the national default — municipalities as islands inside a county that administers the space between them — have the containment backwards here: the town is the general-purpose government and the county is the remainder, not the reverse. Address-to-jurisdiction resolution that falls back to a county when no municipality matches will never fire, and if it does the match was wrong.

The 2024 cycle ran a Democratic primary, a Republican primary and a Libertarian primary — 319 contests each, on the same day, as three separate ballots. Most of this corpus has two, and a schema with a boolean for which major-party ballot a voter took cannot represent a third. The Libertarian primary is not a formality either: it appears against the same offices at the same stage, so a contest joined on office and year without also joining on party stage will collapse three distinct races into one.

Every return carries a Blanks column, so ballots cast and votes cast are separate published numbers — 3,512,930 against 3,473,668 for president in 2024, a gap of 39,262. Elsewhere in this corpus the gap has to be reconstructed, if it can be recovered at all. A consumer that sums candidate columns to get turnout is short by up to 4.29% depending on the town, and one that treats Blanks as a candidate row will invent a contender who placed third in some municipalities.

Massachusetts labels a candidate or voter with no party enrollment as Unenrolled, and it appears directly in the published returns as a party value — four of the eight presidential tickets in 2024 carried it. It is not a party, and it is not the same token as Oregon's Non-Affiliated, Alaska's Undeclared or Alaska's Nonpartisan, each of which is a distinct concept in its own state. Normalising all of them to one value discards the state's own vocabulary; treating Unenrolled as a party name creates an organisation that has never existed.

The Register of Deeds is a county-scale elected office whose geography is the registry district, and the two do not coincide. Berkshire County alone contains three — Northern, Middle and Southern — each electing its own register on its own staggered clock, so in 2024 only four registry contests appeared statewide. Joining these seats to counties one-to-one splits or merges the wrong way in both directions, and a county-keyed office table cannot hold three registers for one county.

The Governor's Council is elected from eight districts and confirms judicial appointments, pardons and warrants. It is a statewide elected body that is neither the legislature nor a constitutional officer, and almost nothing else in this corpus is shaped like it. A tier model with federal, state, legislature, judiciary and local has no slot for an elected council whose function is to confirm the judiciary, and it is not the judiciary itself.

Grouping the 2022 Census government-units list on its own STATE column puts four New England towns in the wrong state — Connecticut's Wolcott lands in Alabama, Maine's Lincoln Plantation and Vermont's Bloomfield land in New Hampshire, and Vermont's Sudbury lands in Massachusetts carrying a Massachusetts mailing address copied from the other Sudbury. Massachusetts appears to have 352 subcounty units and actually has 351. All four rows carry the correct FIPS_STATE, so the defect is in the text field, not the identifier.