sbaltzmit
commented
7 months ago Thanks very much for the attentive comments and the helpful code snippets and visualization. The reason that candidate names are not completely standardized across elections in our precinct data offerings is a subset of a larger fact: joining across years in general is not supported with precinct data. Precincts are very often not the same across years, but it is extremely difficult to tell when they have changed and when they have stayed the same. For further explanation, please see the paper we wrote introducing these datasets:
Importantly, our standardization efforts are aimed at standardizing data within election years, but there is no general way to match precinct-level election results across election years. There is no requirement for a precinct to have the same name from one election to the next, and states may create, abolish, or rename precincts between elections, with or without providing a crosswalk file that matches new precinct names to old precinct names. Worse, precinct boundaries frequently change, so a precinct with the same name in roughly the same location may contain a different population from one election to the next32. We therefore emphasize that users of our datasets are not encouraged to join precincts by name across elections, unless they have verified with a separate source (such as the precinct shapefiles maintained by the United States Elections Project) that the name identifies the same precinct in both years and that the geography of the precinct did not change.
In contrast, our county-level and district-level datasets are designed to be consistent over time, because they describe a unit of geography that is the same over time, so we do make sure to standardize properties like candidate names across elections in those datasets.
Now, I should say that it's easy to agree that we could do simple things like always write "WRITE-IN" instead of "WRITEIN" in every election year, to save users from having to remember to type two different things when they're working with two of our different election datasets. This kind of complete standardization is definitely on our to-do list, but we're a small team, and I don't have a specific date when we plan to take it on. However, insofar as the goal is to facilitate legitimate ways of joining precinct data across elections, those are an edge case -- most ways of joining precinct data across elections require much more data, like national municipal re-precincting records, than we are able to offer.
NickCrews
I am combining this data with the data from 2018 and 2020:
After unioning 2018, 2020, and 2022, the encodings for certain candidates are inconsistent:
this gives:
Can we combine or make these more consistent between all these years?
Perhaps it would be useful to have a more explicit encoding for ballot measures? Like a column "kind" that is either "CANDIDATE" or "BALLOT MEASURE"? IDK, maybe overkill. If the existing column is consistent, then users can assume a row with a candidate of "YES" or "NO" means a ballot measure.