Toghcháin Éireann

Irish election data

Purpose

The primary goal of this project is to open-source all election information available on the island of Ireland.

Secondary supporting aims include, but aren't necessarily limited to:

• Maintaining all election data in a commonly used format (JSON)
• Providing tools for common tasks (eg. scrapers, database scripts, etc.)
• Publishing experimental services that feature the data in insightful ways

Status

Data collection

Progress in this area is as follows:

• Dáil Éireann
• Northern Assembly
• Westminster (north of Ireland)

Data integrity

Little spot-checking has been performed on data gathered to date, so contributions in this area are welcome. The data is incomplete in certain areas.

For example, many results from early in the Free State contain little or no count information, often reflecting only who was elected.

Note: the model for election results is currently undocumented, even though we are a portion of the way through data collection. The model specification will eventually be published in /src.

Tools

As it stands, the only tool released is the database helper mongoloid. mongoloid is responsible for validating the Travis build of toghchain, and is also the fastest and easiest way to get a working copy of an Irish election database up and running on your own instance of MongoDB.

There are some scrapers in existence that were used to gather the data for the initial commit, but these are being refactored prior to release.

As work on the Assembly and Westminster hasn't kicked off yet, ideas for scrapers in these areas are welcome. Anyone with such an idea is encouraged to drop it in Issues for the moment.

Experimental services

This is the most underdeveloped portion of the project. A Rest API is planned, but not started.