Election Results: Data-Wrangling Travis County

Congratulations if you are reading this post, after having even glanced at the predecessor about Ramsey County data wrangling — one of the longer and geekier posts in recent times at TrustTheVote. There is a similar but shorter story about our work with Travis County Texas. As with Ramsey, we started with a bunch of stuff that Travis Elections folks gave us, but rather than do the chapter and verse, I can summarize a bit.

In fact, I’ll cut to the end, and then go back. We were able to fairly quickly develop data converters from the Travis Nov 2012 data to the same standards-based data format we developed for Ramsey. The exception is the GIS data, which we will circle back to later. This was a really good validation of our data conversion approach. If it extends to other counties as well, we’ll be super pleased.

The full story is that Travis elections folks have been working on election result reporting for some time, as have we at TrustTheVote Project, and we’ve learned a lot from their efforts. Because of those efforts, Travis has worked extensively on how to use the data export capabilities of their voting system product’s election management system. They have enough experience with their Hart Intercivic EMS that they know exactly the right set of export routines to use to dump exactly the right set of files. We then developed data converters to chew up the files and spit out VIP XML for the election definitions, and also a form of VIP XML for the vote tallies.

The structure of the export data roughly corresponds to the VIP schema; one flat TXT file that presents a list of each of the 7 kinds of basic item (precinct, contest, etc.) that we represent as VIP objects; and 4 files that express relations between types of objects, e.g. precincts and districts, or contests and districts. As with Ramsey, the district definitions were a bit sticky. The Travis folks provided a spreadsheet of districts, that was a sort of extension of the exports file about districts. We had to extend the extensions a bit, for similar reasons outlined in the previous account of Ramsey data-wrangling. The rest of the files were a bit crufty, with nothing to suggest the meaning of the column entries other than the name of the file. But with the raw data and some collegial help from Travis elections folks, it mapped pretty simply to the standard data format.

There was one area though, where we learned a lot more from Travis. In Travis with their Hart system, they are able to separately track vote tallies for each candidate (of course, that’s the minimum) as well as: write-ins, non-votes that result from a ballot with no choice on it (under-votes), and non-votes that result from a ballot with too many choices (over-votes). That really helped extend the data format for election results, beyond what we had from Ramsey. And again, this larger set of results data fit well into our use of the VIP format.

That sort of information helps total up the tallies from each individual precinct, to double check that every ballot was counted. But there is also supplementary data that helps even more, noting whether an under or over was from early voting, absentee voting, in person voting, etc. With further information about rejected ballots (e.g. unsigned provisional ballot affadavits, late absentee ballots), one can account for every ballot cast (whether counted or rejected), every ballot counted, every ballot in every precinct, every vote or non-vote from individual ballots — and so one — to get a complete picture down to the ground in cases where there are razor thin margins in an election.

We’re still digesting all of that, and will likely continue for some time as we continue our election-result work beyond the VoteStream prototype effort. But even at this point, we think that we have the vote-tallies part of the data standard worked out fairly well, with some additional areas for on-going work.

— EJS