Election Results 2012

This will run on Windows As-Is. On other platforms, you will need to install PJScrape and PhantomJS

For Non Techie Types:

• There's a "ZIP" link above. Click on it to download all the stuff here.
• Extract the zip to somewhere on your hard disk
• double click on scrape.bat inside the new folder
• double click on index.html

Any time you want an update, simply double click on scrape.bat again and refresh or re-open index.html

Usage:

• Run scrape.bat from the command line
• Open up index.html to view results

Status

Currently a few different official state election pages.

• Added CA presidential election, senate, and ballot measures
• Added PA presidential election
• Added OH presidential election
• Added FL presidential election
• Added CO presidential election

To enable the senate and ballot measures being displayed, find and uncomment two lines in pagebuilder.js:

//do_election('ca_senate.json');

//do_measures('ca_measures.json');

Sample listing: ![alt text][logo] [logo]: https://raw.github.com/nevetS/2012-Election-Results/master/sample.png "Example Results"

Outputs json data to various .json files (e.g. ca_pres.json)

JSON files contain a list of candidates/measures and the vote counts.

Output example: [ {"Barack Obama (DEM)":{"percent":"0.0%","votes":"0"}, "Gary Johnson (LIB)":{"percent":"0.0%","votes":"0"}, "Jill Stein (GRN)":{"percent":"0.0%","votes":"0"}, "Mitt Romney (REP)":{"percent":"0.0%","votes":"0"}, "Roseanne Barr (P&F)":{"percent":"0.0%","votes":"0"}, "Thomas Hoefling (AI)":{"percent":"0.0%","votes":"0"}, "election":"CA President", "reporting":"\n 0.0% ( 0 of 24,491 ) precincts partiallyreporting as of November 6, 2012, 12:59 p.m. \n\t\t\t\t\tVisit the County Reporting Status page to determine when a county has submitted its latest report.\n\t\t"} ]

Adding Sites to pull data from

each site to scrape from get's it's on javascript file:

eg: ca_pres.js

inside that file is essentially two lines of code:

1. the config that sets the output file
2. the scraping rule

have a look at ca_pres.js for how it works, or reference the pjscrape quickstart page

Once that's done, add the appropriate line to pjscrape.bat.

The format is: path-to-pahntomjs.exe path-to-pjscrape.js path-to-scrapingJavascriptFile

phantomjs-1.7.0-windows\phantomjs.exe nrabinowitz-pjscrape-19fd7c1\pjscrape.js ca_pres.js

Help Wanted

• Adding more states - I need help identifying the right web pages and building scraping functions
• Data Visualization - that would be pretty cool
• Styling the web page
• Automating the scrapes
• Auto-posting results to a web site so they can be crowdsourced