Impute county_name for VIP datasets

[pratheekrebala]

The data we received from the Voting Information Project often does not contain county information. I have been experimenting with trying to fill these in based on the geo-codes but I've noticed a few issues with this approach:

• Sometimes VIP data doesn't contain last_line (city, state, zip) information which makes it harder to trust the geocode output.
• county_name is one of the fields used to validate the geocode output
• I've also seen a couple of cases in VA where polling place geocodes that were close to the county line got placed in the wrong county.

Another, easier, approach could be to join the precinct_id columns with the open-elections dataset but we'd need to be sure that a precinct name is truly unique which isn't always the case.

Maybe a mix of the two..

[pratheekrebala]

Maybe we can lookup the polling place in the next available non-vip dataset..

[chriszs]

My experience with doing this with using geocodes for VIP data in Texas tells me it’s always going to be a little fuzzy.

[chriszs]

I wonder if one way to handle this would be to add a county_name_source or county_name_precision column.