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election-transparency's Introduction

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

Update: The slack channel #election-transparency was archived on March 26, 2019 after no response to ask for project leads. It was also marked as "archived" on the website.

election-transparency's People

Contributors

chrisdick14 avatar chrispelkey avatar ehbick01 avatar jakemsnyder avatar jenniferthompson avatar jpzhangvincent avatar jsonbecker avatar khturner avatar moridesamoped avatar msmerlak avatar ptrbates avatar rachelanddata avatar rkahne avatar scottcame avatar zachmueller avatar

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election-transparency's Issues

Hackathon Competition

Check out the page here. Winner gets bragging rights, their analysis published on the Data4Democracy Blog, and some cool data.world swag!

This Project is Looking for New Leadership

Scott, Rachel, and I have gotten a little busy and are looking for someone (or a group of people) to take over this project. Please let us know if you are interested.

Data Vizualizations - General

Have an idea for how to bring some clarity and transparency to elections data? We want to see it!

How to get started with the data:

  • Download our R package, which has the most up-to-date data
    or
  • Go over to data.world and grab any of the .csvs that you need.

Create an .md page for State-level voter registration

As part of the voter accessibility project, we would like to collect the voter registration process for each State in an .md file. For example:

Colorado: Online (with drivers license), mail-in, and in-person registration
Texas: Register by mail-in application (must have ink signature of applicant) only within county of residence

Definition of Done: All states (including D.C.) are documented with their voter registration process.

review and upload data to data.world

For the hackathon I downloaded economic inequality data from an Economic Policy Institute paper. Right now it's in data-raw/sommeiller_et_al_2016. Please have a look at it and decide if it deserves to be uploaded to data.world

Collect data from states without registration by party

We need to collect registration data from the (~20) states that do not report party affiliation to round out our dataset. If you are interested, contact @chris_dick on the Slack Group and we can assign you a group of states based on your time availability.

Help document the data

We need to create a couple of README documents (this is our plan now, but we are open to other options) for each of our data files explaining where we sourced the data as well as a data dictionary for each file.

All of this information exists, we just need someone to take the time to aggregate it and put it in a good format.

Collect County-Level Historical Presidential Election Results

We need historical county-level (at least 1988 and >) Presidential election results. Format should match that of the 2016 Election results on data.world

1988
1992
1996 Source - Scroll to the bottom to select a state and then select the "County Data (Graphs)" link. This is in progress, I will post the scraper script when complete - @rachelanddata
2000
2004
2008
2012

Voter registration data for 2012

How goes the progress in obtaining voter registration data for 2012 broken down by county? It seems like this is all we have so far.

>>> registration = pd.read_csv('./data/PartyRegistration.csv')[['County', 'Total', 'Year']]
>>> registration[registration.Year==2012]

      County     Total  Year
1054   15001  104323.0  2012
1084   15009   86053.0  2012
1114   15007   40738.0  2012
1144   15003  474554.0  2012

Is the rest of data publicly available?

Build a simple model of the 2016 presidential election

We have a lot of data put together about the 2016 election, let's build some simple models trying to explain the outcomes so that we can discuss further.

Either of these notebooks would be a good start (if you are working in R):

https://github.com/Data4Democracy/election-transparency/blob/master/notebooks/r-notebooks/model_2016_presresults.Rmd

or

https://github.com/Data4Democracy/election-transparency/blob/master/notebooks/r-notebooks/basic-viz.Rmd

Update 2000/2004/2008/2012 results datasets with Alaska county-level results

Currently, our 2000-2008 presidential election results datasets have data for Alaska at the State House district level, not the county level like all other states. To get to the "county" level (which in Alaska means Boroughs for part of the state, and Census Areas for the unincorporated part), we need to OCR the precinct-level results PDFs for each House District, assemble those into a text file, then write some code to merge the precinct code with the AlaskaPrecinctBoroughMapping.csv dataset on DW.

The 2012 election results dataset does not yet include data for Alaska, so we need to do a similar exercise for that dataset.

Results PDFs are available on the Alaska state website, here: http://www.elections.alaska.gov/Core/voterregistrationstatistics.php

If you begin working on this issue, please drop a post on the #election-transparency channel in Slack to let everyone know.

Document dataset columns in data.world

For those datasets generated from the R package (PartyRegistration, PresidentialElectionResults2016, States, CountyCharacteristics) add descriptions for each column, using the R data frame documentation.

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