Ballots Downloading as .txt Instead of .blt

[Tony]

OpaVote Team,

All of the guidance I find online shows ballots should download as .blt, but I when I go to download them from the results page, they are formatted as .txt.

What should I be doing differently to get them in the .blt or other delimited format that can easily be made into a .csv?

Thank you,

Tony

[Jeff O'Neill]

Hi Tony,

I think we need to clean up our documentation a bit.  

The ballots are downloaded in the blt format, but we now save the file with a .txt extension instead of a .blt extension.  

The reason we did that was to make it easier for people to open the ballot file in notepad and other text processing applications.

There is no easy way to convert ballots to a CSV file.

Jeff

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "OpaVote Support Forum" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to opavote-suppo...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/opavote-support/65656fb3-ec9b-43ee-95eb-9edb9c54949fn%40googlegroups.com.

[Tony Guidotti]

Jeff,

Thank you for your reply. That would be helpful, I thought I was going crazy.

I've found a fairly easy way to convert them to .csv, so all is well.

Best,

Tony

[Sam Young]

Hi Jeff,

I am currently seeking out ways to convert a .CSV file (from our student elections software) to a .BLT (to upload to OpaVote for tabulation). Do you mind sharing how you convert .BLT --> .CSV? There may be a clue somewhere in there for me as well.

Thanks!
Sam

[Zee Spencer]

Hey Sam,

Unfortunately,  we do not have a quick guide for turning a CSV into a BLT file; however the file format is described as part of the OpenTally documentation here: https://yingtongli.me/git/OpenTally/about/docs/blt-fmt.md and this Stack Overflow answer: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2233695/how-do-i-generate-blt-files-for-openstv-elections-using-c

You may need to write a small script to convert the CSV into a BLT