Contest Results Schema

[rtburg]

From @bill10 on August 28, 2017 2:24

All the precinct result files are loaded into the database. I made a readme page of the ingestors for future reference at https://github.com/reesenewslab/ncvoter/tree/master/Ingestor.

The schema for contest results is documented on that page. Just want to confirm about three columns from the data files:

• is_partisan: whether it is a partisan election or not.
• party_contest: party of contest?
• is_unexpired: whether the contest is about an unexpired term
• has_primary: Does this indicate whether the contest has primary contests before it or whether a candidate is the winner of a primary election. I am a little confused by issue #7

Copied from original issue: NCVotes/ncvoter#15

[rtburg]

• It looks like all of the values in the is_partisan field in the contest_precinct table are null. Is that correct? In the CSV attached to #7 the values of the is_partisan field are either TRUE or FALSE.

• party_contest is null unless both has_primary and is_partisan are TRUE. The values of party_contest should be DEM, REP or LIB (although I have only observed DEM and REP. See CSV attached to #7

• is_unexpired indicates whether an contest is being held before the normal expiration of the previous incumbent's term. For the vast majority of cases this value will be FALSE. One example of TRUE would be if there is a special election contest to fill a vacant office. See the is_unexpired field in #7 CSV

• has_primary indicates whether a candidate for a particular contest first must compete in a primary before running in a general election. For partisan races, this value will be true if the number of candidates in a particular party in a particular a contest is greater than the value in the vote_for field (the number of seats that are up for election). For non-partisan races (some of which still have primaries) this value will be true only if the number of candidates in any party exceeds the number of seats up for grabs. As this field exists in the candidate listing CSV found in #7, the value of TRUE only indicates the relationship between the number of candidates and the open seats. At least in this CSV, the field is not an indicator of whether rules for a contest require a primary. For example, if there is only one Republican candidate in a single-seat contest for which rules require a partisan primary then the value of has_primary would be FALSE.

• 7 is a list of candidates in contest for which we do not yet have results. The purpose of having candidates without results would be to answer the question "Who is running for election this year?"

[rtburg]

From @bill10 on August 30, 2017 20:48

7 is loaded into the contest_county table since it has nothing to do with precincts. Query

select * from contest_county
order by election_date desc
limit 1000;

will give some examples.

When the election results are out, this table can be updated to incorporate vote counts.