ellipszist / dataset-election-62-candidates

Thailand Election'62 Candidate Information Browsing Website

Thailand Election'62 Zone and Candidate Dataset and Browsing Website

How did we get candidate data?

In the beginning, we had only PDFs from The Election Commission of Thailand (ECT). So, we had to parse them manually. Details about parsing can be founded in ./notebooks/dev.ipyndb. The process caused several issues, for example, typos from tone marks not ordered properly.

Around 20 Feb 2019, ECT released SmartVote application, we then tracked down APIs that the application uses and were able to retreive the candidate and party information.

Below are the datasets extracted from SmartVote's APIs.

1. Zone candidate information ./data/candidates.csv, ./data/detailed-candidates.csv
2. Party-list candidate information ./data/partylist_candidates.csv with help from @c4n
3. Party information, including leader and secretary's names, address, logo, address, policy /data/party-information.json, ./data/party-logos

Details about tracking down API endpoints used by SmartVote will be written in TODO.

Zone & Candidate Browsering Website

This website has no database. This website provides a quick and simple way for users to see who are candidates in their area, using postcode. As zone and candidate data is rarely changed, a static website is sufficient to this purpose without the use of backend and database. Apart from few components needed to be developed, the static-site approach can be massively scaled, for example deployed behind a CDN service. At peak, we had 5,000 concurrent users without any failure. This technique is also adopted by ELECT Live.

This website has two components, front page, zone and party pages. The first page has a form for entering a postcode or address. We use React for HTML DOM manipulation. Zone and party pages are static files that are generated accordingly. Please see generate-site.py for more details.

Development

Every change made to those pagaes, located in election62, requires regeneration. One can use the following command to automatically update the site:

watch -n 10 'WEBPATH=127.0.0.1:8000 python generate-site.py --env dev'

The script generates the site to ./dist. You can run a static web server from the root directory and access it via http://<WEBPATH>/dist. You might encouter cross-origin issues. If that the case, please verify the value of WEBPATH.

For example, one can use Python's web server module for this purpose:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Statistics

Analysis

The presence of political families in 2019 general election

This Jupyter notebook investigates families with multiple MP candidates as well as their affiliation/electoral area in the 2019 Thai general election. [Notebook]

Acknowledgement

This project is published as a part of ELECT. Founded by several parties who care about democracy and transparent information, the mission of ELECT is to provide insightful information for Thai peoples in order to make a better voting decision. We would like to thank all volunteers behind ELECT, including The Matter, Boonmee Lab, and Minimore, and all contributors on GitHub.