This is a rough experiment in scraping and representing election data. The data is taken from the Warwickshire County Council website, separated out into a MySQL database, and then represented in various ways using CodeIgniter/PHP.

The data

I managed to get hold of data for the main 2009, 2005 and 2001 Warwickshire County Council elections, although the 2001 data was a drag to extract. It doesn't include any by-election results or any district council results. The dice rolled and electoral divisions in Warwickshire changed in 2004 (PDF), so watch out for that. I've checked the data as far as I can, and cleaned up a couple of misspellings of electoral divisions, but it's mostly the same as it was when I extracted it. I've included links back to the original pages so you can check my numbers.

The data was collected in such a way so that we can see where a particular person might have stood in elections, but this depends on their names being the same, and inevitably candidates names aren't always represented consistently in the original data - so in 2009, Alan Cockburn stood in Kenilworth St John's, but in 2005 and 2001 the election papers were widened so that Alan James Lancaster Cockburn could stand. To try and mitigate this, the person page does a search for other people with the same last name and the same first letter of the first name and provides links to those.

There are a couple of candidates standing for a mysterious party named Other - much as I wish there was an Other Party, this is just an umbrella term in the original database for some of the small parties. I'll try and get some idea of who they really stood for and add them back in.

The graphs

The graphs are implemented using Google's Interactive Charts, and I've done very little with them. Hope the bright colours don't hurt your hungover eyes. I would probably prefer something in jQuery, but the charting libraries I've seen using it haven't been quite as sharp as Google's library.

Open Data and the Open Election project

Having just seen Chris Taggart's Open Election Data project I started out wanting to make it opendata'd up, and I think I've managed it for the Elections area. Although to be honest, it just looks like a blizzard of XML when shoved through the W3C RDFa Distiller and Parser. Once a few councils get their data sorted out, I imagine we'll see some sites springing up which will represent this data in interesting ways.

The data I've extracted doesn't include information about the size of the electorate, the number of ballot papers issued or rejected ballot papers, all of which are included on the sample poll on the Open Election Data website.

This isn't a Warwickshire County Council project as such (although I do work there), I've done this in my own time to sharpen my scraping and SQL skills, but hopefully we'll be able to make the data I've extracted available under the WCC Open Data website which is launching shortly - there's more info on the Warwickshire Open Data blog.

Possible improvements

There's lots could be done, the main one I'm thinking of is getting boundary data in there, which could be possible if/when the Ordnance Survey data gets opened up, hopefully very shortly.

Feedback

Send me flowers, abuse, or flowery abuse to my inevitable Twitter account @equaliser.