OpenElections Update

[Derek Willis]

Happy Labor Day, OpenElections folks!

Since we have a lot of people who volunteer their time and work to this project, this seems like a good day to say thank you and to provide an update on what we've been doing. First, we couldn't do what we do without your efforts, whether it's gathering official election results sources and results, converting them into CSV files, helping with our processing pipeline or our public-facing sites. So please accept our gratitude for what you've done.

Second, that work has enabled us to have a productive summer. This summer we've made significant progress on a number of fronts, including:

* Compiling and releasing a nationwide county-level (towns for New England) results for the 2016 presidential election (https://github.com/openelections/openelections-data-us/tree/master/2016)

* Completing 2016 general precinct-level conversion for New York, Mississippi, Kansas and Indiana (4 states with a lot of image PDFs), and nearly finishing South Dakota. We are just 9 states short of having nationwide precinct-level results for the 2016 general election, and several of those are being worked on (https://github.com/openelections/tracker/blob/master/state_status_2016.csv).

* Operating mostly independently, teams of volunteers in Georgia (https://github.com/openelections/openelections-data-ga) and Wisconsin (https://github.com/openelections/openelections-data-wi) have produced pre-processed CSVs for more than a decade's worth of elections. Similar progress is being made in California (https://github.com/openelections/openelections-data-ca).

* Our documentation site (http://docs.openelections.net/) got a nice refresh from Todd Robbins, a Utah volunteer.

We're also very pleased to announce that we've received $25,000 from a donor who wishes to remain anonymous but supports our work. This will help us pay for obtaining election results and for some data entry work, among other things, and we have some ideas for other ways we can use this money to speed our progress, including bounties for particularly tricky parsing jobs.

Right now we're focusing on finishing out the 2016 general results, and if you'd like to help with that please don't hesitate to let us know here or at openel...@gmail.com. You can keep track of our progress at https://github.com/openelections and if you use our data for reporting, data visualization or anything else, be sure to let us know at @openelex on Twitter.

Thank you for all you do to make this project a reality.

Derek Willis and Serdar Tumgoren