US Presidential Election $25k Database Bounty Review(dolthub.com) |
US Presidential Election $25k Database Bounty Review(dolthub.com) |
In Canada, the equivalent data is readily available from Elections Canada[0]. For Provincial elections, the story is a bit more mixed, but open by default is the general rule. Elections Alberta, for example, provides Excel files with poll-by-poll results[1] - it's not as easy to work with as Elections Canada's CSVs, but a little Python can get it into a more reasonable format.
[0] https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=res&dir=rep/of...
[1] https://officialresults.elections.ab.ca/orResultsPGE.cfm?Eve...
In Canada it's nice and easy - federal elections are handled by Elections Canada, provincial elections are handled by each province's election authority, and we don't have cases where an election at one level results in a person at a higher level getting into office. Well, except for Alberta's senate elections which are somewhat farcical anyway (senators are appointed by the Prime Minister, so the results of this particular election are basically vague suggestions that the PM sometimes follows).
Some say this is a bug, but sounds more like a feature. If not, why wouldn't it be fixed when the technology exists? And why would people go over and above to have the current technology installed?
There should definitely be better attribution for this data.
[0] https://twitter.com/derekwillis/status/1361508657154961408
"Many" of the contributors (myself included) used primary sources for their data.
The one contributor that used OE data cited it and it was a small portion of their overall contributions.
The team at Dolthub is great and extremely accessible on their discord. These bounties seem like a great use case for their tech.
If you're into git and data (like I am) then these bounties are just awesome.
I agree this looks like a great enterprise.
Say I decided to skip work tomorrow and try to get a bounty, or at least part of one. What do I do?
They are launching another bounty later this week for college course data.
candidates, counties, precincts, vote_tallies
Without a set of open tables for voters and votes there is no chain of custody. Without a chain of custody this data is academic at best. There is no reliable way to verify it.
Those two tables remove privacy from the voter, and open up the risk of voter intimidation, but that doesn’t change the fact that this data, and any findings associated with it, are, at best, interesting.
The Bounty concept, on the other hand, is commendable.
Basically, it’s a decentralized mess.
Because the Constitution protects how States run their elections from federal restrictions/requirements.
The data created by bounties is free and open.
Our business model is to sell database licenses. We're a database start up. Bounties are the thing that shows off our capabilities the best, so we consider it marketing. It could be more in the future, ie. a two-sided marketplace, but right now, we're just getting started.
The maintainer will review a PR and either accept the PR or ask you to modify it to better fit their requirements or reject it.
For example one of their requirements were no 0 vote rows. So that's a pretty simple SQL query on the database and can be checked before the maintainer does a merge.
All data was required to be sourced. I got most of my data from state and county websites so those links were included with the comments in the PR.
In addition I was in communication with the team via their discord so they would ask for changes to PRs from there also.
This data looks cool too, I'll have a look in the Discord...
I think the final calculation is based on the percent you've added to the final dataset.
edit:
yeah here's the repo that calculates the final payment. https://github.com/dolthub/bounties
I'm kind of fascinated by the process, but I am having a hard time figuring out how this can really work. It can't really be as simple as paying people to shove arbitrary data of unknown value in their dbs, can it?
New York allows candidates to be the nominees even if the candidates aren't in that party. So you had Joe Biden as the nominee for the Democratic Party and then Joe Biden also listed as the nominee for the Working Families party.
Just weirdness like that abounds in the data in almost every state.
In addition a lot of the reporting for precincts was county level, so states wouldn't have a csv that contained all precinct level voting data so you have to go to each county to get that data. Some states have a lot of counties. PA for example has 67 and each county publishes data in a different format with different values.
It's tedious and honestly impossible to automate (at least in the case of PA).
Our elections in Canada are a lot simpler - it's interesting to see how our neighbour does things!
I’m confused how this works. The candidate themselves doesn’t have to claim they are from a particular party to be listed as such? That seems wrong or misleading but what is the point? Is it some kind of hack to garner enough votes for a party to trigger some kind of funding?