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US Presidential Election $25k Database Bounty Review

dolthub.com

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Re: US Presidential Election $25k Database Bounty Review

#21

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

zachmu wrote: post #14
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What level are the differences at? I can see each state having a different reporting format. Do the differences go down to the electoral district or county or something? 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 get…

Differences are down to reporting entity. In the US this is usually the state, but is often the county. I don't think I saw any state with congressional district level differences.

Thanks - this is definitely clearing up some of my misconceptions about how the US votes!

Re: US Presidential Election $25k Database Bounty Review

#22

Post by meepmorp »

CivBase wrote: post #16

How is this not already a public resource offered by the US federal government? Surely it would be trivial to require states to collect and report their election data to the fed using a standardized schema.

Elections are the responsibility of the individual states, so right there there’s at 51 entities with their own data sets. Of course, in many states, elections are handled at county level, so that’s more entities involved. And at least in my state, individual precincts may have different voting systems, within a single county.

Basically, it’s a decentralized mess.

Re: US Presidential Election $25k Database Bounty Review

#23

Post by scintill76 »

CivBase wrote: post #16

How is this not already a public resource offered by the US federal government? Surely it would be trivial to require states to collect and report their election data to the fed using a standardized schema.

"The fed" does not mean "the federal government." "The Fed" means Federal Reserve.

Re: US Presidential Election $25k Database Bounty Review

#24

Post by cmsparks »

Seems like a lot of this data is sourced from OpenElections[0][1]? Not sure about what makes this better than OpenElection's data, especially considering OpenElections seems to have done a large portion of the difficult wrangling work...

There should definitely be better attribution for this data.

[0] https://twitter.com/derekwillis/status/1361508657154961408

[1] https://github.com/openelections

Re: US Presidential Election $25k Database Bounty Review

#25

Post by jb775 »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #8

This is interesting, but why isn't this data easily available by default? I understand that the Presidential Election is actually a separate election in each state, but why wouldn't each state's election authority make that data readily available by default? This really feels like data that should just be out there for anyone to download and analyze. In Canada, the equivalent data is readily available from Elections…

Not only is it not easily available, but there's no current way to validate the vote casting or tabulation process. Biden literally couldn't prove that he won even if he cared to.

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?

Re: US Presidential Election $25k Database Bounty Review

#26

Post by [deleted] »

timsehn wrote: post #15
faitswulff wrote: post #12

This bounty model for data is really interesting. What's dolthub's business model? Clearly the data must be worth more than the bounty.

CEO of DoltHub here. 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.

[deleted]

Re: US Presidential Election $25k Database Bounty Review

#27

Post by faitswulff »

timsehn wrote: post #15
faitswulff wrote: post #12

This bounty model for data is really interesting. What's dolthub's business model? Clearly the data must be worth more than the bounty.

CEO of DoltHub here. 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.

Thanks for your answer! I really like this bounty model. It's really creative and productive.

Re: US Presidential Election $25k Database Bounty Review

#28

Post by hamburglar »

mjangle1985 wrote: post #5
tinco wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you acquired and preprocessed some data for them? How did they verify its correctness? I agree this looks like a great enterprise.

So data was accepted via pull requests. 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 websi…

Do they require you to "show your work" or somehow demonstrate that your methodology is sound? Is there any requirement that it be repeatable (e.g. let's say they find a minor issue in data you sourced. If you were required to provide code that does the work, rather than just the data, it could be fixed and re-run).

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?

Re: US Presidential Election $25k Database Bounty Review

#29

Post by zachmu »

cmsparks wrote: post #24

Seems like a lot of this data is sourced from OpenElections[0][1]? Not sure about what makes this better than OpenElection's data, especially considering OpenElections seems to have done a large portion of the difficult wrangling work... There should definitely be better attribution for this data. [0] https://twitter.com/derekwillis/status/1361508657154961408 [1] https://github.com/openelections

A portion of it was sourced from openelections, yes. These were attributed in the PRs, but not in the README for the repository. We've corrected this oversight in attribution and issued an apology.

Re: US Presidential Election $25k Database Bounty Review

#30

Post by throwawaysea »

mjangle1985 wrote: post #17
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What level are the differences at? I can see each state having a different reporting format. Do the differences go down to the electoral district or county or something? 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 get…

New York is a great example of weirdness. 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 wou…

> 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.

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?

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