Election_Analysis

Overview of Election Audit

A Colorado Board of Elections employee has given you the following tasks to complete the election audit of a recent local congressional election.

• Calculation the total number of votes cast.
• Get the voter turnout for each county.
• Calculate the total number of votes, and percentage of votes from each county out of the total count.
• Determine the county with the highest turnout.
• Get a complete list of candidates who received votes.
• Calculate the total number of votes each candidate received.
• Calculate the percentage of votes each candidate won.
• Determine the winner of the election based on popular vote.

Election Audit Results

Election results output to Terminal

Election Results in TXT file

• How many votes were cast in this congressional election?

  • There were 369,711 votes cast in the election.

• Provide a breakdown of the number of votes and the percentage of total votes for each county in the precinct.

  • County Jefferson received 38,855 number of votes and 10.5% out of the total votes.
  • County Denver received 306,055 number of votes and 82.8% out of the total votes.
  • County Arapahoe received 24,801 number of votes and 6.7% out of the total votes.

• Which county had the largest number of votes?

  • Denver had the largest number of votes.

• Provide a breakdown of the number of votes and the percentage of the total votes each candidate received.

  • Candidate Charles Casper Stockham received 23.0% of the votes and 85,213 number of votes.
  • Candidate Diana DeGette received 73.8% of the votes and 272,892 number of votes.
  • Candidate Raymon Anthony Doane received 3.1% of the votes and 11,606 number of votes.

• Which candidate won the election, what was their vote count, and what was their percentage of the total votes?

  • Candidate Diana DeGette, who received 73.81% of the votes and 272,892 number of votes.

Election Audit Summary

• The script PyPoll_Challenge.py we developed in this analysis can be modified so that it can be used in other elections. Here we may generalize the script to analyse election results for different states:
  1. Retrieve additional "State" information from the source file.
     • Assume the source file election_results.csv also included the "State" information at the second column (i.e. between the "Ballot ID" and "County")
     • The list index for reading data from the source file cen be modifed according to the new CSV data structure.

       with open(file_to_load) as election_data:
           reader = csv.reader(election_data)
       
           # Read the header
           header = next(reader)
       
           # For each row in the CSV file.
           for row in reader:
               # Add to the total vote count
               total_votes = total_votes + 1
       
               # Extract the state name from each row.
               state_name = row[1]
               # Extract the county name from each row.
               county_name = row[2]
               # Get the candidate name from each row.
               candidate_name = row[3]
       

  2. Use a list of dictionaries to keep and manipulate the vote information
     • Create a list of dictionaries state_county_candidate_data = [] where the keys are "state", "county", "candidate" and "counts", and each state and each county and each candidate, and the corresponding vote counts are the values for those keys.
     • In each row read from the CSV data file:
       • If the current state and county and candidate is NOT in the list state_county_candidate_data, append a new record to the list.

         state_county_candidate_data.append({"state":state_name, "county":county_name, "candidate":candidate_name, "counts":0})
         

       • Add a vote to that state-county-candidate's vote count.

         # "i" is the list index
         state_county_candidate_data[i]["counts"] += 1
         

     • Use for-loop to get the state list from the list state_county_candidate_data:
       • For each state:
         • Use for-loop to get the county list of this state.
         • For each county:
           • Retrieve the candidate name and the vote count for that candidate in that county.
           • Calculate the votes as a percentage of the total votes of that county.
           • Print the county-candidate results to the terminal and output file.
           • Print the winning candidate information for this county.
         • Retrieve the vote counts in that state.
         • Calculate the votes as a percentage of the total votes of all the states.
         • Print the results to the terminal and output file.