the voter.dat file contains county names and integer numbers, but i cant read it. im trying to read the .dat file and store it(perhaps in an array, or just scan it if possible).
initially just try to read in the data line by line and echo it to the screen, e.g. see getline()
http://www.cplusplus.com/ref/iostream/istream/getline.html
then depending on the exact format of the data on a line seperate it into country names and integer values - have you an example of the data?
once you have that you can start to think about putting it in an array, vector or some other data structure
post what code you already have