The “VoteStream Files” A Summary

The TrustTheVote Project Core Team has been hard at work on the Alpha version of VoteStream, our election results reporting technology. They recently wrapped up a prototype phase funded by the Knight Foundation, and then forged ahead a bit, to incorporate data from additional counties, provided by by participating state or local election officials after the official wrap-up.

Along the way, there have been a series of postings here that together tell a story about the VoteStream prototype project. They start with a basic description of the project in Towards Standardized Election Results Data Reporting and Election Results Reload: the Time is Right. Then there was a series of posts about the project’s assumptions about data, about software (part one and part two), and about standards and converters (part one and part two).

Of course, the information wouldn’t be complete without a description of the open-source software prototype itself, provided Not Just Election Night: VoteStream.

Actually the project was as much about data, standards, and tools, as software. On the data front, there is a general introduction to a major part of the project’s work in “data wrangling” in VoteStream: Data-Wrangling of Election Results Data. After that were more posts on data wrangling, quite deep in the data-head shed — but still important, because each one is about the work required to take real election data and real election result data from disparate counties across the country, and fit into a common data format and common online user experience. The deep data-heads can find quite a bit of detail in three postings about data wrangling, in Ramsey County MN, in Travis County TX, and in Los Angeles County CA.

Today, there is a VoteStream project web site with VoteStream itself and the latest set of multi-county election results, but also with some additional explanatory material, including the election results data for each of these counties.  Of course, you can get that from the VoteStream API or data feed, but there may be some interest in the actual source data.  For more on those developments, stay tuned!