voter_poll_join

Join a voter record with the appropriate precinct poll location.

Documentation

1. Clone this voter_poll_join repo.

   $ git clone [email protected]:mroswell/voter_poll_join.git
   

2. Ensure that your comma-separated voter and poll files match the format of the sample CSV files (voter_file.csv and precinct_polling_list.csv). Note: nearly any prefix before the "-" in the 'Precinct ID' and 'Precinct' fields could work, as long as there is a 'state' field in the voter file, and a 'State/ZIP' field in the poll file. The number of digits in the zip code (in either file) does not matter.

3. Ensure that you have Python 2.7.x installed.

   $ python --version
   

   If it is not already installed, find the download here: https://www.python.org/download/

4. Optionally: run this command in your repo directory to ensure that you have local disk space available for the output files. (Substitute the names of your two input files)

   $ python checkspace.py INPUT_VOTERFILE.csv INPUT_POLLFILE.csv
   

   If you run:

   $ python checkspace.py
   

   without any filename arguments, it's equivalent to:

   $ python checkspace.py voter_file.csv precinct_polling_list.csv
   

5. Install csvkit

   $ pip install csvkit
   

If pip is not already installed, follow the installation documentation here: https://pip.pypa.io/en/latest/installing.html

If you are a Windows user, [see these important instructions](https://github.com/mroswell/voter_poll_join/blob/master/windows_users.md "Windows User Instructions").

6. Run the voter_poll_join.py program with three filename arguments, as follows:

   $ python voter_poll_join.py INPUT_VOTERFILE.csv INPUT_POLLFILE.csv OUTPUT_FILE.csv
   

   Note that the two INPUT CSV files must already exist (per step 2 above). If you run:

   $ python voter_poll_join.py
   

   without any arguments, it will join the sample files. This is equivalent to the following:

   $ python voter_poll_join.py voter_file.csv precinct_polling_list.csv voter_poll_joined.csv
   

The result will be three new files, located by default in the same directory as your cloned repo:

• parsed_voter_file.csv
• parsed_precinct_polling_list.csv
• voter_poll_joined.csv (or the path/filename you specified as your OUTPUT_FILE.csv); This file is your final result (unless you're on Windows).

If you're on Windows, continue with these steps.

Note

To facilitate placement on GitHub, the voter_file.csv and precinct_polling_list.csv line ends were changed to unix style via the dos2unix utility. http://sourceforge.net/projects/dos2unix/