Re: Election Reporting

[Thom Wysong <wysong@technodemocracy.org>]

Tim Bovee wrote:
"... I believe there is some ambiguity in defining the second-phase 
Reporting section. By this do we mean the way secretaries of state (in the 
U.S.) and other election officials report returns to the media and directly 
to the public via the WWW, or do we understand this to also encompass the 
way returns are reported by media (principally AP and Voter News Service) 
to display devices used by television stations and to politically oriented 
web sites. (By the former I mean the software that puts returns on the 
screen as overlays.) ..."

I may be wrong here, since I am not familiar with the specifics of how 
election results are currently reported. But with that said, I would think 
that the content of the announcements (the data they contain) would be 
exactly - or almost exactly - the same, regardless of who is reporting the 
election results. The only exception to this, I would imagine, is that news 
services may wish to report only a subset of the data which election 
officials report. If this is true, then I would think that the reporting 
subset of EML would be presentation-neutral and news-source-neutral. Each 
news source could then have a standard transformation engine to convert the 
EML report into their own, customized format.

For example, EML could report results something like this ....

<election-report>
    <report-title>Vote-Count Totals for US President - 2002 Election - 
State of California<report-title>
    <report-timezone>PST + 8 hours = GMT</report-timezone>
    <report-date>2002-11-05</report-date>
    <report-time>22:05:31</report-time>
    <report-source>
       <name>John Mott-Smith</name>
       <title>Chief Election Officer, State of California</title>
       <phone>916-555-0001</phone>
        <fax>916-555-0002</fax>
        <website>www.ss.ca.gov/elections/elections.htm</website>
    </report-source>
    <sort-order>
        [contest],[jurisdiction-1],[jurisdiction-2],
        [jurisdiction-3],[jurisdiction-4],
        [candidate],[valid-votes]
    </sort-order>
    <contest contest-name="US President" contest-date="2002-11-05">
       <jurisdiction-1 name="US">
          <jurisdiction-2 name="State of California">
             <jurisdiction-3 name="Orange County">
                <jurisdiction-4 name="City of Anaheim">
                   <candidate name="Alice">
                      <valid-votes>43,342</valid-votes>
                   </candidate>
                   <candidate name="Bob">
                      <valid-votes>6,017</valid-votes>
                   </candidate>
                   <candidate name="Carol">
                      <valid-votes>48,591</valid-votes>
                   </candidate>
                   <candidate name="Dave">
                      <valid-votes>2,311</valid-votes>
                   </candidate>
                </jurisdiction-4>
             </jurisdiction-3>
          </jurisdiction-2>
       </jurisdiction-1>
    </contest>
</election-report>

I'm not an XML expert, so my XML syntax may be incorrect here - but you get 
the idea. A real report would, obviously, be much larger -- and would 
probably look different -- than this example. Once an election official has 
released an election-report like this, then AP or VNS or whomever could run 
the report through their EML parser and output this content in AP format, 
or VNS format, or whatever. This is only an idea on how to handle the 
reporting, but it's what makes sense to me at this point. Perhaps there is 
more involved here than I am aware of.

Tim Bovee wrote:
"... Historically, the AP national and state tables format has driven the 
software design of returns display technology. ..."

These table formats sound like they would be a useful example for us to be 
aware of. Would it be possible for us to see what they look like? Or, are 
they proprietary/closed?

-Thom