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CSV Documentation

Getting Started

If you're a state or local election official reading this, first, thank you for your work and your interest in the project. The data required to participate in this project is typically found in absentee voter roster files, voter registration databases, or voter history files. Sometimes all three...and maybe others. The standard looks to capture Uniformed and Overseas Citizen Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) transactions, such as:

  • when a voter requests a ballot;
  • when the application is processed;
  • to what country the ballot is sent and when;
  • why an application/ballot is rejected; and,
  • whether a voter is military or overseas citizen.

To make the process of collecting data easier, this project borrows lessons from the Voting Information Project's (VIP's) approach to data collection: use a flat file format for data collection and push any transformations downstream.

Naming Convention

Due to the many issues around elections data collection and cleanliness, much of the data still requires some form of human oversight. Therefore, having a relatively accessible file naming convention is beneficial. While this is not a hard-and-fast rule, anyone producing data in this standard should use the following naming convention, which borrows from a yet-unreleased version of the Voting Information Project's documentation.

esbdata-${ELECTION_DATE}-${STATE}[-${LOCAL}].{csv|zip}

An explanation of each of the segments of the file naming convention above are as follows:

  • ${ELECTION_DATE} - The date of the election in ISO 8601 format.
  • ${STATE} - The full state name (e.g. Alaska, Arkansas, etc...) and not the abbreviation. If there are spaces in the state name, they should be substituted with underscores (e.g. New York -> New_York).
  • ${LOCAL} (optional) - This additional identifier should be used if the file contains data from a specific jurisdiction. As with ${STATE} above, all spaces should be substituted with underscores. For example, if the data contained in the file only covers Maricopa County, AZ for the November 6, 2012 election, the file name would be esbdata-2012-11-06-Arizona-Maricopa_County.csv.
  • {csv|zip} - If the file is an uncompressed CSV document, the extension should be .csv. If the file is zipped, the file extension should end with .zip.

For a final example, esbdata-2012-11-06-Iowa.zip denotes Iowa's data for the Nov 6, 2012 election that has been compressed.

Data Fields

The following fields are possible data points for each transaction that the standard hopes to collect.