This is interesting, but why isn't this data easily available by default? I understand that the Presidential Election is actually a separate election in each state, but why wouldn't each state's election authority make that data readily available by default? This really feels like data that should just be out there for anyone to download and analyze.<p>In Canada, the equivalent data is readily available from Elections Canada[0]. For Provincial elections, the story is a bit more mixed, but open by default is the general rule. Elections Alberta, for example, provides Excel files with poll-by-poll results[1] - it's not as easy to work with as Elections Canada's CSVs, but a little Python can get it into a more reasonable format.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=res&dir=rep/off/43gedata&document=byed&lang=e" rel="nofollow">https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=res&dir=rep/of...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://officialresults.elections.ab.ca/orResultsPGE.cfm?EventId=60" rel="nofollow">https://officialresults.elections.ab.ca/orResultsPGE.cfm?Eve...</a>
Seems like a lot of this data is sourced from OpenElections[0][1]? Not sure about what makes this better than OpenElection's data, especially considering OpenElections seems to have done a large portion of the difficult wrangling work...<p>There should definitely be better attribution for this data.<p>[0] <a href="https://twitter.com/derekwillis/status/1361508657154961408" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/derekwillis/status/1361508657154961408</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/openelections" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/openelections</a>
So is this basically a combination of Mechanical Turk and a bug bounty?<p>Say I decided to skip work tomorrow and try to get a bounty, or at least part of one. What do I do?
The voting data consists of four tables:<p>candidates,
counties,
precincts,
vote_tallies<p>Without a set of open tables for voters and votes there is no chain of custody. Without a chain of custody this data is academic at best. There is no reliable way to verify it.<p>Those two tables remove privacy from the voter, and open up the risk of voter intimidation, but that doesn’t change the fact that this data, and any findings associated with it, are, at best, interesting.<p>The Bounty concept, on the other hand, is commendable.
How is this not already a public resource offered by the US federal government? Surely it would be trivial to require states to collect and report their election data to the fed using a standardized schema.
This bounty model for data is <i>really</i> interesting. What's dolthub's business model? Clearly the data must be worth more than the bounty.