Elections are essential for everyday people to influence the decisions that affect their lives. For elections to succeed, election boards, monitors, and other stakeholders need to support effective and inclusive practices. They also need to identify and address election vulnerabilities.
Timing is important to both of these efforts. Although many of us are familiar with the campaigning and voting of elections, many critical stages in the electoral cycle occur long before or after election day. Stakeholders need to know when these stages occur, so that they can support elections at each stage.
The International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) works with civil society, public institutions, and the private sector to support free and fair elections around the world. They are partnering with DataKind DC to understand the timing of these stages, both for individual elections and in the aggregate. This work will help stakeholders consider:
- When will donations have the greatest impact?
- When are elections most at risk, and when is the time to act?
The result will provide insights about the timing of electoral cycles around the world. It will use visuals to make those insights available to IFES staff, election officials, donors, academics, and the public at electionguide.org.
See the following resources to learn about the project:
- GitHub: https://github.com/DataKind-DC/ifes-elections
- Documentation: https://ifes-elections-data-visualization.readthedocs.io/
- Application: Stay tuned.
To install, first clone the repository:
git clone https://github.com/DataKind-DC/ifes-elections
Second, install the project Python package, possibly in a virtual env.
python3 -m venv env/ifes/
source env/ifes/bin/activate
pip install -e .
Third, put a .env file in the root directory. This file contains credentials
for activating the Election Guide API. Ask a data ambassador for access.
Finally, download and process the raw data using make:
make
We aim to characterize the timing of electoral cycles around the world.
Although each election is different, most elections have common phases like candidate registration, election day, and dispute resolution. We will use historical election data from IFES to identify when these phases start and end for individual countries and elections. We will also aggregate these timelines to characterize archetypal elections. Some specific questions:
- How long are different election phases?
- How long before election day or inauguration do they occur?
- At what time of year do they occur?
- How frequently do they occur over time?
Our first deliverables will be rough, iterative visuals. These visuals will help us identify key insights about electoral cycles and experiment with effective presentation methods.
The final deliverable will polish the initial visuals and present them through an interactive user interface, possibly hosted on electionguide.org.
Data will come from electionguide.org, the IFES election data clearinghouse. Stay tuned for details on the API and specific sources and fields of interest.
We will implement this project in several stages.
- Identify key questions and outcomes.
- Identify and inspect data sources.
- Discuss and set up project infrastructure.
TODO
TODO
There are several ways to contribute to this project. These areas of work are independent and happen in parallel. They also build one another. The earlier stages are informal and good for newcomers. The later stages are more formal and a good fit for volunteers who are familiar with the project.
Create issues. Have an idea for a visualization or other improvement? You can document the idea so that you or a teammate can make it happen. Be sure to include a descriptive name. Also describe the desired feature as clearly and with as much detail as possible.
Explore. Create a Jupyter Notebook or R Markdown document to explore some aspect of the data, or to experiment with a new visualization. These documents can be quick and informal. The goal is to spark useful discussions.
Package good ideas. Some exploratory work will produce code that others will want to use. Think critically about the design, add to the codebase, and document new functionality. This work is more formal, using unit tests, documentation, coding conventions, and more centralized design to promote maintainability and easy use.
Go to production. Work on the public facing application.
We welcome your help! Whether you like data wrangling, exploratory analysis, documentation, visual design, or software development, your ideas and effort are valuable. To get started:
- Connect with us on the #elections channel of the DKDC Slack.
- Check out our open issues.
- Fork this repository.
- Submit a pull request with your work.
On Slack you can meet the team, get on our meeting schedule, and determine how your interests fit our priorities.
Our Data Ambassadors work with IFES staff and organize volunteer efforts.
- Nathan Banion (nbanion)
- Sanjay Ramchandani (sramchandani)
- Pooja Tyagi ()