smarthi/election-transparency

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

Election Transparency

Slack: #election-transparency

Project Leads: @chris_dick, @rachelanddata, @scottcame

Maintainers (people with write/commit access):

• GitHub: @scottcame, @rachelanddata, @eric_bickel, @chris_dick
• data.world: @scottcame, @sharon, @chris_dick

Data: Head over to data.world to check out our most up-to-date data! If you are interested in an explanation of everything the group has collected, head over to the data-dictionary

Group Description: Our group is focused on work that will further the transparency and understanding of the U.S. electoral system. From making elections data more readily and easily available, to creating models that help us better understand why elections turn out the way they do, this group is ready to tackle it! Currently, we are working on the following projects - and the team leads are always willing to work on other projects, so let us know if you have a great idea:

1. Modeling Presidential Election Outcomes at the county level (Want to learn more?)
2. The impact of how congressional and legislative districts are drawn (Want to learn more?)
3. Collecting and analyzing data on voting accessibility and voting laws (Want to learn more?)
4. Collaborating with the OpenElections Project to collect elections data to make them open to the public (Want to learn more?)

For more on the overall objectives of the group, take a look at our objectives statement.

Getting Started

Want to Contribute?

• If you would like to work on a project, please let one of the team leads know
• "First-timers" are welcome! Whether you're trying to learn data science, hone your coding skills, or get started collaborating over the web, we're happy to help. If you have any questions feel free to pose them on our slack channel, or reach out to one of the team leads. If you have questions about Git and GitHub specifically, our github-playground repo and the #github-help Slack channel are good places to start.
• Feeling Comfortable with GitHub, and Ready to Dig In? Check out our GitHub issues and projects. This is our official listing of the work that we are planning to get done. As we add more issues, the maintainers will make sure to specifically tag those issues that are good for beginners with: beginner-friendly
• This README is a Living Document: If you see something you think should be changed feel free to edit and submit a Pull Request. Not only will this be a huge help to the group, it is also a great first PR!
• Got an Idea for Something We Should be Working On? You can submit an issue on our GitHub page, mention your idea on the slack channel, or reach out to one of the project leads.

Want to start exploring the data?

Check out our data on data.world , as comma-separated value (csv) files or using their API. Or, you can install the R package, and access the datasets as R data frames. See https://github.com/Data4Democracy/election-transparency/tree/master/r-packages/uselections for more about the R package and data frames.

Skills

The following is a non-exhaustive list of the skills that are useful for this project:

• R: The code that transforms raw voter registration and election results data is in an R package. So if you're interested in enhancing that, or working with source data, R skills are beneficial.
• Python
• Data Extraction
• Data Cleaning
• Data Analysis and Modelling