The idox software generates seven files for each ward for each council. An eighth file “How to understand the Preference Profile for each electoral ward” (this name varies) is usually added. This is a single-page PDF document which decodes the data content of the Preference Profile file. This explanatory PDF document is the same across all wards within a particular council – the only difference across councils is that the document has the contact details of the particular council’s election team at the foot of the document (in practice, often “XXXXX”).
Each of the 32 councils has to offer for download the following eight (sometimes the last file is ignored) report files:
- Declaration of Results
- Candidate Votes per Stage Report
- Transfers Report
- First Preference Report
- Preference Summary Report
- Preferences by Ballot Box Report (manually edited; often missing)
- Preference Profile
- How to understand the Preference Profile (generic explanatory document)
Preference Profile file
From a data analysis perspective, the Preference Profile file is far-and-away the most important file. The file contains text lines with counts of the number of voters who ranked their choices in a particular sequence e.g. “5 3 1 6 0” implies that 5 voters ranked their ballot paper selection as 1st choice: #3 on the ballot paper; 2nd choice: #1 and 3rd choice: #6. The “0” indicates end-of-sequence.
For whatever reasons, the file is offered for download with varying file extensions e.g. *.BLT, *.CSV, *.PDF and *.TXT. To be clear, this is an unstructured text file – it is not in any way a CSV (comma-separated variable) style. I would suggest offering it as a *.TXT file for straight-forward viewing.
ZIPed File Sets
As stated elsewhere, each council has to produce ZIP file sets for each of their wards for summarising by the Electoral Management Board (EMB). Unfortunately, it appears that these ZIP file sets are deleted after the EMB summarising process is completed. Only three of the of the 32 councils make these ZIP file sets available for download – this makes it a very tedious and error-prone downloading exercise (one-by-one from most of the 32 council websites) for anyone who wants to view or research all of the file data sets for all 32 councils.
Dundee - has ZIP for each Ward
Glasgow City - has ZIP for each Ward - some multi-versions
Inverclyde - has ZIP for each/ALL Wards - single ZIP for all wards Data Files Set – Versioning
What appears to be version numbers e.g. V0001, V0002,, are often embedded in the downloaded filenames. I assume these correspond to extra runs of the idox software at counting time. For those 29 websites that don’t offer a ZIP file only one version is offered (presumably the correct one). When unZIPing Glasgow City’s ZIP file there are several wards which offer multiple versions of the same file – again I assume that the highest version number encountered is the correct one. However, as a general point, I don’t think it follows that the highest version number is necessarily the correct one – it may be the case that an earlier version was the one adopted for publishing. I think it would be prudent to publish precisely one version – obviously the one adopted for publishing.
Uncontested Wards
I have noticed that the results of Uncontested Wards are not listed on the relevant council’s website – and neither is any set of files supplied wherever there is a ZIP file available. As an example, the following two councils each had an uncontested Ward 1 – but there is simply a gap in the results page – and although there is a ZIP file available (for all? the wards) there are no files for Ward 1:
Comhairle nan Eilean Siar Ward 01
Inverclyde Council Ward 01I assume that uncontested wards are still setup and processed by the eCounting system – so why are the corresponding report and data files missing? Of course, there are no complex calculations required – but there should still be (simple) output files generated and made available for completeness.