data4democracy/election-transparency

A Data4Democracy community working to make elections and elections data more transparent

election-transparency's Issues

Collect Mississippi voter registration data

Need to contact the Secretary of State and see if they can send us the data. It appears not to be on the website.

Update 2000/2004/2008/2012 results datasets with Alaska county-level results

Currently, our 2000-2008 presidential election results datasets have data for Alaska at the State House district level, not the county level like all other states. To get to the "county" level (which in Alaska means Boroughs for part of the state, and Census Areas for the unincorporated part), we need to OCR the precinct-level results PDFs for each House District, assemble those into a text file, then write some code to merge the precinct code with the AlaskaPrecinctBoroughMapping.csv dataset on DW.

The 2012 election results dataset does not yet include data for Alaska, so we need to do a similar exercise for that dataset.

Results PDFs are available on the Alaska state website, here: http://www.elections.alaska.gov/Core/voterregistrationstatistics.php

If you begin working on this issue, please drop a post on the #election-transparency channel in Slack to let everyone know.

California - Collect historical voter registration data

Data: http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voter-registration/voter-registration-statistics

Colorado - Historical voter registration data

data: https://www.sos.state.co.us/pubs/elections/VoterRegNumbers/VoterRegNumbers.html

Find and Load useful non-voting data for models

Fork the code here: https://github.com/Data4Democracy/election-transparency/blob/master/scripts/read_data.Rmd

or

write your own code to pull data from Census (or anywhere else you can find useful data) for us to use in our modelling. The focus right now is on the most recent data we can find for the 2016 election, but down the road we will also want historical data if anyone wants to start with that!

Collect data from states without registration by party

We need to collect registration data from the (~20) states that do not report party affiliation to round out our dataset. If you are interested, contact @chris_dick on the Slack Group and we can assign you a group of states based on your time availability.

Hackathon Competition

Check out the page here. Winner gets bragging rights, their analysis published on the Data4Democracy Blog, and some cool data.world swag!

This Project is Looking for New Leadership

Scott, Rachel, and I have gotten a little busy and are looking for someone (or a group of people) to take over this project. Please let us know if you are interested.

Document dataset columns in data.world

For those datasets generated from the R package (PartyRegistration, PresidentialElectionResults2016, States, CountyCharacteristics) add descriptions for each column, using the R data frame documentation.

Collect County-Level Historical Presidential Election Results

We need historical county-level (at least 1988 and >) Presidential election results. Format should match that of the 2016 Election results on data.world

1988
1992
1996 Source - Scroll to the bottom to select a state and then select the "County Data (Graphs)" link. This is in progress, I will post the scraper script when complete - @rachelanddata
2000
2004
2008
2012

Pulling down district level voter registration

Would like a time-series for redistricting work.

Voter registration data for 2012

How goes the progress in obtaining voter registration data for 2012 broken down by county? It seems like this is all we have so far.

>>> registration = pd.read_csv('./data/PartyRegistration.csv')[['County', 'Total', 'Year']]
>>> registration[registration.Year==2012]

      County     Total  Year
1054   15001  104323.0  2012
1084   15009   86053.0  2012
1114   15007   40738.0  2012
1144   15003  474554.0  2012

Is the rest of data publicly available?

Help free Indiana data from terrible PDF (Open Elections)

This is a hackathon project. The OpenElections Project is trying to make elections results more accessible to the public. Help them out by taking a crack at the following issue: openelections/openelections-data-in#8

Data Vizualizations - General

Have an idea for how to bring some clarity and transparency to elections data? We want to see it!

How to get started with the data:

• Download our R package, which has the most up-to-date data
  or
• Go over to data.world and grab any of the .csvs that you need.

Build a simple model of the 2016 presidential election

We have a lot of data put together about the 2016 election, let's build some simple models trying to explain the outcomes so that we can discuss further.

Either of these notebooks would be a good start (if you are working in R):

https://github.com/Data4Democracy/election-transparency/blob/master/notebooks/r-notebooks/model_2016_presresults.Rmd

or

https://github.com/Data4Democracy/election-transparency/blob/master/notebooks/r-notebooks/basic-viz.Rmd

Connecticut - Historical voter registration data

Data: http://www.sots.ct.gov/sots/cwp/view.asp?a=3179&q=401492

Help document the data

We need to create a couple of README documents (this is our plan now, but we are open to other options) for each of our data files explaining where we sourced the data as well as a data dictionary for each file.

All of this information exists, we just need someone to take the time to aggregate it and put it in a good format.

Arizona Historical Voter Registration Data

Finish pulling and incorporating Arizona historical data into the uselections package.
Data Source: https://www.azsos.gov/elections/voter-registration-historical-election-data/voter-registration-counts

review and upload data to data.world

For the hackathon I downloaded economic inequality data from an Economic Policy Institute paper. Right now it's in data-raw/sommeiller_et_al_2016. Please have a look at it and decide if it deserves to be uploaded to data.world

Collect Partisanship and Competitiveness Data

Create an .md page for State-level voter registration

As part of the voter accessibility project, we would like to collect the voter registration process for each State in an .md file. For example:

Colorado: Online (with drivers license), mail-in, and in-person registration
Texas: Register by mail-in application (must have ink signature of applicant) only within county of residence

Definition of Done: All states (including D.C.) are documented with their voter registration process.

Alaska - Collect Historical Voter Registration Data

The data for the 2016 election have already been collected. We need to collect historical data. Contact @scottcame about issues with mapping to boroughs (Alaska's county equivalents)
Data: http://www.elections.alaska.gov/vi_vrs-er.php

Pull and load / clean the 1990, 2000, and 2010 Decennial Congressional District File

Collect Historical Texas Registration Data

Basic Descriptive Visualizations of the presidential elections data

Use the presidential elections data on data.world to create basic visualizations about the contests. Ideas include (but are not limited to):

• Candidate vote totals
• Party Registration
• Voter Turnout
• Victory Margins
• Demographic / Economic Variables

Create state and county level choropleths

Use the 2016, 2012, 2008, 2004, and 2000 Presidential Election Results to create choropleths for results.