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panda-loaders

These scripts began as a way to load voter data into a PANDA instance via its API.

Along the way, the end-of-life of Python 2 appeared on the horizon, and the wonderful PANDA project has fallen a bit out of date.

We're not giving up on PANDA, but for now, the voter script has been updated to run in Python 3.6+ and to be able to create a Postgres database of voter data as an alternative to feeding the data to a PANDA instance.

If you use the Postgres option, you'll get an indexed database ready to be plugged into a Django project, if desired. This repo is not a working Django project, but a Django model that can be used to hook up the Postgres voter db is included in /voters/models.py.

Getting started

First, install the Python requirements:

pip install -r requirements/base.txt

The voter script is tailored to Florida but could be adapted. It requires some source data and a date value:

  • County voter registration files, which in Florida are available from the state's Division of Elections.
  • A VOTER_DATA_DATE value in YYYY-MM-DD form, provided by an environment variable of that name or by manually editing the script's global variable. This is used to name the database, to provide a default source_date in the voters_voter table and to provide a YEAR value for accessing the right data directory.

Local directories

The load_county_voters script uses some local directories as it transforms the raw data.

The assumed directory structure, all expected to live under a directory named for the data year (such as 2019/), includes these folders:

Folder Use
VoterDetail Put raw county voter files here
load Prepped voter files
loaded Voter files that were sent to PANDA
prep Processing folder
temp Processing folder

The load_county_voters script will look for a local environment variable, PANDA_LOADERS_BASE_DIR, to use as the base directory for the above folders, and will default to /tmp as the base directory if no environment var is found.

Running the script

With raw voter files in place, you can run the voter script with python load_county_voters.py plus one of four arguments:

  1. [RAW FILE]: You can pass in a file name for a raw county voter file, such as BAY_20190312.txt. This will prep a single raw file for loading to a database or to PANDA, if the raw file is in /VoterDetail/.
  2. prep_files: This preps all raw county files found in /VoterDetail/ and makes them ready for export to a database or to PANDA.
  3. load_to_postgres: After files are prepped, this will create, load and index a Postgres voter database. If you put all 67 Florida county files in the /VoterDetail/ directory and prep them, this will create a statewide database of Florida voters.
  4. export_to_panda: To export all prepped county files to a PANDA instance, creating one dataset per county.

PANDA loading

If you use the script to load data into a PANDA instance, the process uses PANDA's API, which is slow. But the API method has some advantages over PANDA's manual data upload process.

  • It sidesteps memory issues that you can encounter in PANDA's loading GUI.
  • It only uses PANDA index space, rather than index space + file storage space.
  • It results in a dataset with external_id values, which makes rows editable via the API.