The source of the data used in this project can be found at openelections.net
Special thanks to Derek Willis for his guidance throughout this project!
About Open Elections & Our Project
Since the country’s inception, the United States has used elections to appoint its government officials. Today, there are over 500,000 elected officials in the United States @lawless_2012. Currently, there is an information gap in voting record data for the election of these officials at the state and local levels. Although United States citizens are given the right to access any election data through acts such as the Freedom of Information Act @fec_gov, election information is often not easily accessible or usable.
First, election data is not always easy to find. Despite the advancement of technology and the popularity of the internet, not all government offices use the internet to publicize their election data. Additionally, there is no standard way for government offices to collect election data. Thus, election data can come in the form of PDFs, databases, images and other various formats. Therefore, elected offices of the United States lack a standardized format for publishing voting results.
The lack of a standard format for voting results poses a serious problem for those seeking to analyze election data. There is currently no free, extensive, and easily accessible way of gathering election data from multiple election offices. Anyone who is interested in working with election data often struggle to gather usable election data. This is particularly troublesome when people want to build visualizations, graphics or analyses based off of aggregated election results.
Open Elections is an open-source political-party-independent project started by Derek Willis, an interactive developer at the *New York Times*, to provide clean and usable data from state and local elections to those who need it regardless of that persons data literacy. From their website, when speaking about the goals of the Open Elections project, they state:
“we want the people who work with election data to be able to get what they need, whether that’s a CSV file for stories and data analysis or JSON usable for web applications and interactive graphics ...Our goal is to create the first free, comprehensive, standardized, linked set of election data for the United States, including federal and statewide offices." @willis2
In order to achieve their goal, the Open Elections project has a team of volunteers that tackle every step of the process of getting the non-standardized election data from government offices to a standard form accessible on their Github repository @willis. This process entails many steps, starting with gathering the election data and putting them into their databases. As previously mentioned, the election data can have a variety of forms and sources thus the volunteers work on obtaining the election data which can mean anything from scraping from a website to calling a government office and asking for mailed documents. After gathering the election data, volunteers use a variety of techniques to convert the election data into the standard CSV format used by the Open Elections project. Depending on the skillsets of the volunteers involved in this process, this is done by methods such as manual data entry or python scripts.
Although the Open Elections project has a large team behind it, there is copious amount of work that needs to be done in completing its goals. There are thousands of elected offices and years of election results that need to be transformed into their standard format. The goal of our project is to contribute to the Open Elections project by delineating methods that can be used to free the election data from PDFs effectively and then convert the data into usable forms such as the Open Elections standard CSV format and an interactive visualization.
