[dwillis]

Totally reasonable view, and one of our volunteers actually got the law in Kansas changed to mandate electronic publishing of statewide precinct results in a structured format! But finding legislative champions for this issue isn't easy.

[ghghgfdfgh]

I’ve tried using LLM’s to do the same exact thing (turning precinct-level election results into a spreadsheet) and in my experience they worked rather poorly. Less accurate than traditional OCR, and considering how many fixes I had to make, altogether slower than manual entry. The resolution of the page made an outsized difference. It’s nice that you got it to work, but I am skeptical of it as a permanent solution.

Tangentially- I appreciate what OpenElections does- however, I wish there was a similar organization that did not limit themselves to officially certified results. There are already other organizations who collect precinct results post-2016, and using only official results basically limits you to 2008 and afterwards, but historical election results are the real intrigue. Not to mention that I have noticed many blatant errors in election results that have supposedly been “certified” by a state/county government. The precinct results Pennsylvania publishes, for example, are riddled with issues.

[dwillis]

Skepticism is a necessary trait in this type of work, for sure. I will say that the performance has improved substantially in the past year, and there are still PDFs that require a lot of work.

We went with official precinct results for two main reasons: there are differences between election night and final results (some of them non-trivial) and to make the work more manageable. Agree that historical results are a real problem, and as a PA native I know only too well the errors that the state data contains, which is why we go county-by-county there.