Convert 2020 General Election Precinct Results

[dwillis]

If you want to work on a county, add a comment saying which one you'd like to work on or email openelections@gmail.com. You can either email us finished CSV files or submit a pull request, whatever is easiest.

The results files you'll be converting are in the California sources repository. Many of these are either PDFs or Excel files. For electronic PDFs, we recommend using Tabula, which is free, to extract data. The goal is to create a single CSV file for each county, with the following headers:

county, precinct, office, district, party, candidate, votes

If the county file also provides a breakdown of votes by method, include those using the following headers:

early_voting, election_day, provisional, mail

For the following offices: President, U.S. House, and any State Senate or State Assembly races. File names should be: 20201103__ca__general__{county_name}__precinct.csv, with the county name lower case and spaces replaced with underscores.

An example file looks like this

• Alameda
• Alpine
• Amador
• Butte
• Calaveras
• Colusa
• Contra Costa
• Del Norte
• El Dorado
• Fresno
• Glenn
• Humboldt
• Imperial
• Inyo
• Kern
• Kings
• Lake
• Lassen
• Los Angeles
• Madera
• Marin
• Mariposa
• Mendocino
• Merced
• Modoc
• Mono
• Monterey
• Napa
• Nevada
• Orange
• Placer
• Plumas
• Riverside
• Sacramento
• San Benito
• San Bernardino
• San Diego
• San Francisco
• San Joaquin
• San Luis Obispo
• San Mateo
• Santa Barbara
• Santa Clara
• Santa Cruz
• Shasta
• Sierra
• Siskiyou
• Solano
• Sonoma
• Stanislaus
• Sutter
• Tehama
• Trinity
• Tulare
• Tuolumne
• Ventura
• Yolo
• Yuba

[aidanconnolly]

I'll start on Alameda.

[andysylvester]

I will take Alpine County.

[goodasha]

Added Lake general #147.

[goodasha]

I will take Mendocino.

[aidanconnolly]

I've got Placer.

[carbonphyber]

I took a stab at Santa Clara #148 .
If any other counties use ClarityElections.com to store/display elections data, please have a look at my PR.

[goodasha]

I will take Tulare.

[omarcoming]

I will take Colusa.

Edit: I will also do Contra Costa and Kern counties as their reporting format is the same for Colusa.

[omarcoming]

How should we deal with precincts where vote tallies have been withheld by the Elections Dept due to the small precinct / low turnout resulting in issues with protecting voter privacy?

For example, Contra Costa county has several precincts where the In-Person tallies are censored but we could easily infer the proper counts by subtracting the Vote By Mail portion from the Total. Should I be including that inferred data?

The other issue I'm running in to is with precincts that haven't reported either the Vote By Mail or In-Person tallies for any candidates and only include the totals. What is the standard for representing missing data on this project?

[dwillis]

@omarcoming good questions, thank you! We don't infer data, so try to represent things as they are reported. In practice, you can put N/A in the appropriate column for tallies that are withheld. For precincts that only have the totals, just list the total.

[omarcoming]

If the county file also provides a breakdown of votes by method, include those using the following headers:

early_voting, election_day, provisional, mail

What if the breakdown is just in-person vs mail?

[dwillis]

@omarcoming then just use mail and election_day, unless the in-person combines election day and early voting. In that case, do mail and in_person and we'll figure it out.

[goodasha]

I'll take Imperial