OpenElections Update: Nov. 19, 2017

[Open Elections Team]

Greetings, OpenElectioneers!

Here's an update on what we've been up to the past few months, and some ways you can plug into our work:

1. 2016 General Election Precinct Results

We are nearly finished with a nationwide precinct results file that includes all federal, statewide and state legislative results. We're now working on some of the more difficult states, including Texas, Nebraska and South Dakota, and a few that require a lot of parsing work, like New Jersey and Massachusetts. In Texas, we have converted results for 240 of the state's 254 counties, and we're working to obtain county files from the remainder. In South Dakota we have two counties remaining and in Nebraska we're 2/3rds of the way done. 

In a few other states, like Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky, we're tracking down some errors & missing data and fixing those. You can see issues on each state's data repository on Github: https://github.com/openelections

If you live in or have experience with any of these states, let us know if you're interested in helping us finish the job. You can see our state-by-state progress here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15_7PV0AuLjMgutAGiuGVquZJQ2l0lWkusckuHhIBXrQ/edit#gid=0

2. Backfilling Other States

We've got volunteers working on converting previous election results in states like California, Mississippi, Wisconsin, Georgia, Oregon and South Carolina. California is a great example of this work: https://github.com/openelections/openelections-data-ca

Again, if you have an interest in a state, chances are we could use some help backfilling our collection, so get in touch.

3. Organizing Original Sources

In states where we've collecting county-level files (like KS, TX, NY, NE and others), we've created large collections of original results files. Currently those are organized in an ad-hoc fashion, but if you're looking for a way to contribute that doesn't require any coding, we'd love to have folks working on a better way for us to standardize these collections. That includes everything from how we name the files to whether they are organized by geography, by year, or some combination of factors. Take a look at Kansas (https://github.com/openelections/openelections-sources-ks) as an example. We welcome any suggestions on how we should organize these documents and make information about them available.

As always, we thank you for helping us build a free and open collection of machine-readable election results, and this week we're especially thankful for our volunteers. We wouldn't be where we are without you.

Sincerely,

Derek & Serdar