Go to the other website hosting the Consolidated Election Results Portal: https://stv-results.prorep.org.uk
The attempt here is to offer for download all the data files sets for the Scottish Local Government Elections May 2022 – by the following criteria:
- All data file sets by Council and then by Ward within Council. This is in a similar style to that already offered by the 32 Council websites – but offered from a single location – and in a consistent manner.
- A fully consolidated ZIP file containing ALL the dat file sets for ALL the wards for ALL the councils.
Zipped file sets are now available for each Council – and also a single ZIP file containing the data file sets from ALL councils.
The “Preferences by Ballot Box Report” files were often missing (not offered for download). I find this very strange as they appear to be of the family of idox-generated files.
I had managed to streamline the task of clicking and downloading all the data files. The very basic downloading wasn’t so bad after all – around 8 hours.
However, the processing and correction of the files took far longer – around 25 hours:
- Renaming the files to match their content. This was the most time-consuming aspect (with filenames like CANDID_1.PDF, file8935.pdf,,,,+ very many misspellings).
- Correcting the file contents of the Preference Profile files. As I stated before, this file is offered for download in many styles:. .blt, .txt, .csv, pdf, .xlsx.
- Even with programmatic file conversion from .pdf and .xlsx to .txt files there was often correction required.
- Corruption in many files, particularly .pdf and .xlsx. e.g. missing quotes at the foot of some files which prevented parsing.
This consolidated data files structure is published from a separate website. This other website has been designed intentionally to be very simple and basic. The reason for this is that the content of the website – web pages and download links – is built programmatically (auto-generated) from a few driver text files and the consolidated data files structure.
Go to the other website hosting the Consolidated Election Results Portal