Election Results Reporting – Assumptions About Standards and Converters (concluded)

Last time, I explained how our VoteStream work depends on the 3rd of 3 assumptions: loosely, that there might be a good way to get election results data (and other related data) out of their current hiding places, and into some useful software, connected by an election data standard that encompasses results data. But what are we actually doing about it?

Answer: we are building prototypes of that connection, and the lynchpin is an election data standard that can express everything about the information that VoteStream needs. We’ve found that the VIP format is an existing, widely adopted standard that provides a good starting point. More details on that later, but for now the key words are “converters” and “connectors”. We’re developing technology that proves the concept that anyone with basic data modeling and software development skills can create a connector, or data converter, that transforms election data (including but most certainly not limited to vote counts) from one of a variety of existing formats, to the format of the election data standard.

And this is the central concept to prove — because as we’ve been saying in various ways for some time, the data exists but is locked up in a variety of legacy and/or proprietary formats. These existing formats differ from one another quite a bit, and contain varying amounts of information beyond basic vote counts. There is good reason to be skeptical, to suppose that is a hard problem to take these different shapes and sizes of square data pegs (and pentagonal, octahedral, and many other shaped pegs!) and put them in a single round hole.

But what we’re learning — and the jury is still out, promising as our experience is so far — that all these existing data sets have basically similar elements, that correspond to a single standard, and that it’s not hard to develop prototype software that uses those correspondence to convert to a single format. We’ll get a better understanding of the tricky bits, as we go along making 3 or 4 prototype converters.

Much of this feasibility rests on a structuring principle that we’ve adopted, which runs parallel to the existing data standard that we’ve adopted. Much more on that principle, the standard, its evolution, and so on … yet to come. As we get more experience with data-wrangling and converter-creation, there will certainly be a lot more to say.

— EJS