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Parsing NSW 2021 Local Government data

This data can be found on the NSW Election Commission website fairly readily. It is, at the time of writing, at the addresses specified below, but this is likely to change in the future as it is moved to the past elections results page.

As always, pay attention to the copyright statements when downloading data! At the time of writing, the NSW Electroral Commission has a quite permissive license. Kudos to them for this.

Use the parse_ec_data program to convert their files to ConcreteSTV's .stv format, with the NSWLG2021 data source. Note that in the examples below I am leaving off the path to the command parse_ec_data.

E.g. to parse the City of Albury's data from the NSW 2021 local government election, run the command

parse_ec_data --out Albury.stv NSWLG2021 "City of Albury"

This will tell you you need a file fp-by-grp-and-candidate-by-vote-type.html. Download it from the Albury page on the NSW Election Commission website. This (and other files that will be subsequently requested) can currently be done with

wget -O fp-by-grp-and-candidate-by-vote-type.html https://vtr.elections.nsw.gov.au/LG2101/albury/councillor/report/fp-by-grp-and-candidate-by-vote-type
wget -O councillor.html https://vtr.elections.nsw.gov.au/LG2101/albury/councillor
wget -O grp-and-candidates-result.html https://vtr.elections.nsw.gov.au/LG2101/albury/councillor/report/grp-and-candidates-result
wget -O finalpreferencedatafile.zip https://vtr.elections.nsw.gov.au/LG2101/albury/download/finalpreferencedatafile.zip

Note that the URLs of these are likely to change in the future, as specified above. Look for them on the past elections website.

This will create the file Albury.stv which can be used by concrete_stv to count.

Note that if you run this with the NSWECLocalGov2021 rules (concrete_stv NSWECLocalGov2021 Albury.stv) the resulting transcript will be different from the official detailed transcript. The reason for this is that on count 13, there is a tie between PATTINSON Jill (candidate 27) and VAN NOORDENNEN Bill (candidate 43). This can be seen in the EC decisions needed column of the viewer. This tie is, by legislation, to be determined by lot. ConcreteSTV needs to know what the choice made by the NSW Electoral Commission actually was. In the absence of being told, ConcreteSTV chooses to favour the higher numbered candidate (who is worse of donkey-vote wise). Thus PATTINSON Jill is excluded. In this particular case however, the NSWEC decided (presumably by lot) to exclude VAN NOORDENNEN Bill.

You can specify the NSWEC decision in the .stv file by adding a --tie flag to parse_ec_data with the affected candidates ordered by increasing luck:

parse_ec_data --out Albury.stv --tie 43,27 NSWLG2021 "City of Albury"

Problems

You may need openoffice installed on your system to read some NSW data. This is used to help decode some of the files in .xlsx format.

Alternatives

You can also download many already converted files from the online version of ConcreteSTV either from a web browser or (looking at copyright messages in the web browser first, which in this case is : Derived from data © State of New South Wales through the NSW Electoral Commission. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License) then on the command line:

wget -O Albury.stv https://vote.andrewconway.org/NSW%20Local%20Government/2021/City%20of%20Albury/data.stv