Voting Data Project

Nicholas Munce

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Jul 8, 2016, 8:51:41 AM7/8/16

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Hey everybody!

I'm a student at UW-Madison in computer science, just getting underway in terms of my development career. I am really interested in civic hacking, and have been trying to actively apply my development skills to some summer work that I am doing in the State Capitol. I have made a pretty rough script that takes voter data from the now-defunct Government Accountability Board and pushes out some ward-by-ward voting pattern statistics. I've posted it on my GitHub, which I also, admittedly, have a very limited understanding of. The version right now is entirely uncommented and basically useless, but I am working on commenting a version to merge.

In any case, I am interested in getting involved in this community, and figured opening up my first big project/my GitHub to critique would be a good way to get involved. I look forward to making more contact with this group!

Best,

Nicholas Munce

Erik Paulson

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Jul 9, 2016, 8:14:22 PM7/9/16

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Welcome Nicholas!

You've picked a space that's basically the core problem of a lot of civic tech: source data is usually not in a format that's easy to reuse without some additional processing. It's cool that you put your code for doing those transforms online!

Some related work that you might want to check out - the OpenElections project has been working on collecting and parsing election data from all 50 states. Their Wisconsin code is online here:

https://github.com/openelections/openelections-data-wi

The folks who have been working on the Wisconsin data are in the group and are local to Madison.

OpenElections is doing most of their work in Python, which is something you might want to think about working in too - it's especially useful for doing interactive data analysis once you've actually parsed the data: the Jupyter/IPython notebook is like having the ease of Excel with the full power of a real programming language, along with great graphing and geomapping capability built-in too. It's definitely a handy tool to be skilled with.

Thanks for sharing!

-Erik

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Erik Paulson

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Jul 13, 2016, 10:08:55 PM7/13/16

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And just as a followup, Marc is getting some folks together for Open Elections hacking next Tuesday night at the Downtown Library:

http://www.meetup.com/Civic-hacking-Madison/events/232586906/

-Erik

Marc Brakken

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Jul 14, 2016, 12:23:11 PM7/14/16

to hackingmadison, Nick Munce

Thanks for the plug, Erik!

I should add, next Tuesday's event is the brainchild of Davi and Nicholas D (credit where it's due). I'm merely an intermediary agent :)

http://www.meetup.com/Civic-hacking-Madison/events/232586906/

All are welcome.

Best,

Marc

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Davi P

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Jul 14, 2016, 12:45:55 PM7/14/16

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Hello Nicholas, and all --

The OpenElections work in WI was started by Aaron Couch in Nov 2015. He revived the Madison Civic hacking meetup in January, it has been meeting monthly since. Aaron moved to Philadelphia in May. Nick D and I have been continuing work on OpenElections. We met last month and made some progress. You can see that work here:

https://github.com/davipo/openelections-data-wi/commits/master

I did some more work on it, but have been too busy with my job to finish the commits. I'll try to get that done by the weekend, so y'all can look at it before our meetup next Tuesday. Thanks to Nick D for helping to keep this project going.

Erik, thanks for putting our meeting on Meetup. Marc, hope you can make it, haven't seen you there in a while!

--Davi

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Davi P

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Jul 18, 2016, 11:20:36 PM7/18/16

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Latest work on openelections-data-wi is on GitHub, in this branch:

https://github.com/davipo/openelections-data-wi/commits/dp-parse_office

Some improvements, and some problems. I have questions about the desired output -- can anyone find documentation on that?

Should the name of the county appear as part of the office name for some offices? As in:

District Attorney - Fond Du Lac County

EAU CLAIRE COUNTY CIRCUIT COURT JUDGE, BRANCH 1

I'm guessing it's better to leave it there for now, to preserve the original coding.

Is it useful to extract the name of the county from the office to fill an otherwise empty County field?

I think the next task is to QA the data, and probably update the tests.

Plenty more cleanup to do in parser.py. I'm happy to give a tour of what I've figured out so far.