Load 2017 municipal candidates into db

[rtburg]

From @rtburg on August 24, 2017 15:7

The N.C. State Board of Elections on Aug 21 released what appears to be a clean and clear list of candidates participating in municipal elections in North Carolina this year. It is at https://s3.amazonaws.com/dl.ncsbe.gov/Candidate_Filing/Candidate_Listing_2017.csv. We should load the candidates into our database.

A few items to note:

• Each row is a candidate in a contest in a county. Most candidate-in-a-contest are unique in a single county, but there are 69 contests and 251 candidates who are in more than one county. In election results files since January 1, 2014, the Board links these contests in multiple counties using a "contest_group_id" field. We should do the same with candidates.
• There are only 95 of 100 counties in this file. The five missing counties do not have elections this year. They are Alexander (next in 2019), Lincoln (moved to 2018), Stanly (moved to 2018), Currituck (no municipalities in county), and Hyde (no municipalities in county).
• If there are contests for which no candidate has filed (this has happened in the past and I believe is happening in at least one contest this year) there will be no record of it in the CSV.
• Values in "has_primary" field are complicated. It will appear TRUE only for candidates that are actually running in a primary. So searching for contests with has_primary = TRUE will miss races in which there are two candidates but neither has a primary (contests in which there is only one Democrat and only one Republican, for example).
• All candidate names appear to be unique. There appear to be 3,086 candidates in 1,074 contests.

See also #8

Copied from original issue: NCVotes/ncvoter#7

[rtburg]

From @bill10 on August 28, 2017 0:46

The data is ingested into table contest_county in the database.

[rtburg]

From @bill10 on August 28, 2017 0:57

Before closing this issue, I am a little confused about the comment on the column "has primary"

Values in "has_primary" field are complicated. It will appear TRUE only for candidates that are actually running in a primary. So searching for contests with has_primary = TRUE will miss races in which there are two candidates but neither has a primary (contests in which there is only one Democrat and only one Republican, for example).

If I am in a primary contest but I am the only Democrat candidate, then my has_primary field will be false?

[rtburg]

If I am in a primary contest but I am the only Democrat candidate, then my has_primary field will be false?

That is correct.

Here's some more explanation of what this looks like in the real world:

• For a given contest, there is a rule that there will be a partisan primary if there are more candidates than available seats.
• If candidates > seats for a given party, then the board of elections will actually hold a primary, print ballots, etc.
• If candidates <= seats for a given party, then the board of elections will not bother with holding a primary, etc., since the result is a foregone conclusion.

So for a given contest, there might be a RULE that a primary will be held. But in many cases an actual primary may not be held in any particular year.

[rtburg]

From @bill10 on August 30, 2017 20:12

thanks. good to note these exceptions in the schema