ZH Vote Crawler

This is an unofficial crawler to retrieve data from the Statistical Office of the Kanton Zürich. No guarantees provided.

The goal is to write a crawler to fetch and extract the html tables of www.wahlen.zh.ch.

This crawler is intitially written for the cantonal election on April 12th 2015. But it may be useful thereafter aswell.

The two example pages of the two upcoming elections are:

• Kantonsratswahlen
• Regierungsratswahlen

Links to the hot pages and data from it can not be published until the polls close at April 12th 12:00 PM.

How to use

The crawler can be used via grunt or directly in javascript.

npm install zh-vote-crawler --save

The crawler assumes to be running with TZ=Europe/Zurich for correct meta data time readings.

Grunt

All tasks require --election-id parameter.

grunt --help

Examples

grunt fetch:exe:combined --election-id=rr2015_preview
grunt fetch:leg:lists:combined --election-id=kr2011_medieninfo --year=2011 --previous-year=2007
 
# detail endpoints 
grunt fetch:exe:canton --election-id=rr2015_preview
grunt fetch:exe:areas --election-id=rr2015_preview
 
grunt fetch:leg:lists:canton --election-id=kr2011_medieninfo
grunt fetch:leg:lists:constituencies --election-id=kr2011_medieninfo
grunt fetch:leg:candidates --election-id=kr2011_medieninfo
 
grunt fetch:leg:lists:comparison:canton --election-id=kr2011_medieninfo --year=2011 --previous-year=2007
grunt fetch:leg:lists:comparison:constituencies:percent --election-id=kr2011_medieninfo --year=2011 --previous-year=2007
grunt fetch:leg:lists:comparison:constituencies:seats --election-id=kr2011_medieninfo --year=2011 --previous-year=2007

Results will be written to data/results.

Never used npm and grunt?

Install Node.js on your machine. Then install grunt globally and the dependencies locally.

npm install -g grunt-cli && npm install

JavaScript

The crawler always returns a q promise object. The crawler has a waiting time of 500ms between requests and always runs requests sequently.

Examples

var crawler = require('zh-vote-crawler');
 
crawler.leg.lists.canton('kr2011_medieninfo').then(function(resultSet) {
  console.log(resultSet);
});
crawler.leg.lists.comparison.canton('kr2011_medieninfo', 2011, 2007).then(function(resultSet) {
  console.log(resultSet);
});
crawler.exe.combined('rr2015_preview').then(function(resultSet) {
  console.log(resultSet);
});

Data Format

Result Set

{
  "source": {
    "time": "2015-03-25T12:13:00.000Z",
    "area": [
      185, // counted
      185  // total
    ],
    "complete": true,
    "fetched": "2015-04-06T20:17:19.976Z",
    "electionId": "kr2011_medieninfo",
    "urls": [
      "http://www.wahlen.zh.ch/wahlen/kr2011_medieninfo/viewer.php?menu=kand_kanton"
    ],
    // result set with previous values
    "year": "2011",
    "previousYear": "2007"
  },
  "meta": [],
  "results": []
}

All dates are UTC time strings.

Meta Object

Meta object can hold any arbitrary data about a result object. The data should not be geo specific. The only mandatory fields are id and type.

{
  "id": "1-101",                 // mandatory
  "type": "candidate" || "list", // mandatory
  // example candidate
  "name": "Ernst Bachmann",      // first + last name
  "party": "SVP",                // party abbr
  "incumbent": true,             // previously elected
}

Result Object

{
  "id": "SVP",                   // mandatory
  "type": "list" || "candidate", // mandatory
  "geography": {                 // mandatory, spatial limitation of result
    "id": 17,                    // see meta data section
    "type": "constituency",
    "area": [                    // constituency only: partial count info
      10,                        // counted
      22                         // total
    ],
    "complete": false            // area[0] === area[1]
  },
  "votes": 84034,                // absolute vote count
  // list only
  "voters": 98,                  // absolute voters count
  "votersPercent": 17,           // percentage of voters
  "votesPercent": 19,            // percentage of votes
  "quorum": true || false,       // has minimal votes to participate
  "seats": 36,                   // seats
  "previousSeats": 35,           // seats in previouse election
  "previousVotersPercent": 1     // percentage of votes in previouse election
  "previousVotesPercent": 1      // percentage of votes in previouse election
  // candidate only
  "elected": true                // is elected
  // exe candidate only
  "majority": 84034,             // number of votes to reach majority
  "hasMajority": true            // if majority is reached
}

All non mandatory may or may not be available. The sections only imply that they could appear with a specific result or election type.

It is possible that hasMajority is defined and majority is missing since some source pages only indicate weather majority is reached but not the number of votes required.

Meta Data

Some meta data is needed to aggregate and later visualize the results.

Geography

geo_source.json is a modified version of the topojson file published by the Statistical Office provided by Matthias Mazenauer.

Matching is done with normalized and slugified area names which seems like the only available option.

Geo Types

Type	Values	Description
canton	ZH	canton abbreviation
constituency	1-18	constituency #
area	1-999999	BFSK - GDENR + district #