chi-elections is a Python package for loading and parsing election results from the Chicago Board of Elections.
The Board of Elections provides election-night results at a racewide level. The file lives at
http://www.chicagoelections.com/results/ap/summary.txt
before election day, for testing.
It lives at
http://www.chicagoelections.com/ap/summary.txt
on election night.
From http://www.chicagoelections.com/results/ap/text_layout.txt:
Summary Export File Format Length Column Position Contest Code 4 1-4 Candidate Number 3 5-7 Num. Eligible Precincts 4 8-11 Votes 7 12-18 Num. Completed precincts 4 19-22 Party Abbreviation 3 23-25 Political Subdivision Abbrev 7 26-32 Contest name 56 33-88 Candidate Name 38 89-126 Political subdivision name 25 127-151 Vote For 3 152-154
Prior to election night, the test file will include all fields. At some point on election night, the file will only contain the numeric values in the first 22 columns.
This means that you need to:
- Make sure you save candidate names in some way, like a database, before election night
- Make sure you store ballot order (Candidate Number in the text layout above) with the candidate. You'll need to use this, in combination with Contest Code, to look up the cached candidates.
At some point at the end of election night, the results file will no longer be available at http://www.chicagoelections.com/ap/summary.txt and will be available at http://www.chicagoelections.com/results/ap/summary.txt . However, it will not be updated. You'll need to scrape, enter or load results in some other way if you need updates after election night.
To access the results:
from chi_elections import SummaryClient
client = SummaryClient()
client.fetch()
mayor = next(r for r in client.races if r.name == "Mayor")
self.assertEqual(len(mayor.candidates), 5)
rahm = next(c for c in mayor.candidates
if c.full_name == "RAHM EMANUEL")
print(rahm.vote_total)
If you want to specify an alternate url, for example the test URL, pass it to the constructor of SummaryClient:
client = SummaryClient(url='http://www.chicagoelections.com/results/ap/summary.txt')
After election night, precinct-level results are published to http://www.chicagoelections.com/en/election3.asp. The results are HTML files, so we have to scrape the results from HTML tables.
To access the results:
from chi_elections import PrecinctClient
client = PrecinctClient()
client.fetch_elections()
election = next(e for e in client.elections
if e.name == "2015 Municipal Runoffs - 4/7/15")
election.fetch_races()
race = next(r for r in client.races
if r.name == "Mayor")
race.fetch_results()
To download a CSV version of the summary file, run:
chi_elections summary > results.csv
To hit the test file:
chi_elections summary --test > results.csv
To download precinct results, available the day after:
chi_elections precincts --race "Delegate, National Convention 4th DEM" 5
In this example the 5 is the election code, that can be found in the URL when you visit a page like http://www.chicagoelections.com/en/wdlevel3.asp?elec_code=5