As I was going through and processing the (new) VA election night reporting data provided by Enhanced Voting, I noticed a number of technical issues with the data feed. I’ve tried to capture them here in the attempt to help assist the VA Department of Elections in correcting bugs and implementation issues with their new reporting format.
While the new ENR data feed is commendable in that it presents the data for the state in an easily obtainable JSON formatted file, the following issues were observed in my processing of the data. I am happy to provide specific examples of these issues to the Enhanced Voting development team in order to help address them.
- Inconsistent JSON formats being returned. Sometimes locality group results information is a cell of structures, sometimes an array.
- Occasional mal-formed JSON, missing opening or closing parentheses or brackets causing the file to not be able to be parsed by JSON importing functions in python, MATLAB, etc.
- Occasional duplicated locality precinct group result information