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US Presidential Election $25k Database Bounty Review

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Re: US Presidential Election $25k Database Bounty Review

#31

Post by patcon »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #19
mjangle1985 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's fascinating! Thank you for the explanation! Our elections in Canada are a lot simpler - it's interesting to see how our neighbour does things!

Canada. Canada! Canada! — another Canadian :)

Re: US Presidential Election $25k Database Bounty Review

#32

Post by mjangle1985 »

hamburglar wrote: post #28
mjangle1985 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

Join the discord and hit them with some questions. I'm sure they'll be happy to answer you.

Re: US Presidential Election $25k Database Bounty Review

#33

Post by mjangle1985 »

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 lot" of the data wasn't sourced from Open Elections. Derek's claim is not true. As far as I know one user used Open Elections data for a portion of their total contributions (and attributed it in their PR).

"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.

Re: US Presidential Election $25k Database Bounty Review

#34

Post by clarge1120 »

The voting data consists of four tables:

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.

Re: US Presidential Election $25k Database Bounty Review

#35

Post by rcxdude »

throwawaysea wrote: post #30
mjangle1985 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Parties don't get votes (at least in most elections), the candidates do. The candidates can be members of a party and may be endorsed by them. in NY it sounds like a party can endorse a non-member. This doesn't sound fundamentally wrong or misleading to me.

Re: US Presidential Election $25k Database Bounty Review

#36

Post by CivBase »

meepmorp wrote: post #22
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.

It can stay a decentralized mess. All the federal government has to do is require states to collect and report specific data in a specific format. They don't have to take over the election process. Apparently the states are already keeping records of that data since this project was able to reach 100% for the 2016 election, so they're already half way there.

Re: US Presidential Election $25k Database Bounty Review

#37

Post by CivBase »

scintill76 wrote: post #23
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.

Yeah, sorry. Hopefully it was clear what I meant in context.

Re: US Presidential Election $25k Database Bounty Review

#38

Post by hamburglar »

mjangle1985 wrote: post #32
hamburglar wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

Join the discord and hit them with some questions. I'm sure they'll be happy to answer you.

Why not answer here? It’s an opportunity to generate more hacker interest. I’m probably not going to sign up for discord to ask one question.
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