I want to get started, but needed to ask a question. How do I create the offices under the county government category? Like District Attorney, Assessor, etc.

I want to get started, but needed to ask a question. How do I create the offices under the county government category? Like District Attorney, Assessor, etc. Here's my advice on how to get started with a few tips / tricks to make it go easier. I'll use Bent County, Colorado as example https://www.ourcampaigns.com/ContainerDetail.html?ContainerID=3209 1. Create containers for the offices with the correct categories. When I started none of the offices existed. The county container had cities and that's about it, so I needed to create containers for each office. A. On the left hand side underneath the cities on the county page there is a link labeled Add New Subcategory To Bent (There will be a link like this in every container in the same relative location). A new page will open up titled "ADD NEW CONTAINER Country" B. Select the right category - in my case I scrolled down in the drop down list to select County Government (This seems to be what most people are selecting for the executive elected positions in each county) The other trick here is to try to use existing categories rather than create new ones. For example, use "County Government" rather than create a new category named "Bent County Government". The latter would be too specific for a container category. C. In the name box I entered in the title of the office - Assessor. D. I hit save to create the container for the County Assessor. E. To navigate back to the county page, I went to the top of the page and clicked the Bent link on the parents line just above the category. (This is more of a tip, as this is a quicker way to get back to the county and reduces the number of clicks to get back to county. This will come in handy if you do are doing lots of entry.) F. Repeat A - E for each office. 2. Create containers for another category of offices like the legislative body. A. On the left hand side underneath the cities, use the link labeled Add New Subcategory To Bent - ADD NEW CONTAINER Country will open. B. Select the right category - in my case I scrolled down in the drop down list to select County Commission (This was most close to Board of County Commissioners. Again try to re-use whats in there before creating a new category. Looks like there are containers for County Council, County Board. Find a county that is similar to the one you are creating and model yours after it) C. In the name box I entered in the title of the office and district - Board of Commissioners District 1. (All Colorado Counties have 3 or more County Commissioners elected by Districts. You might have some At-large county legislators, so you might need to create containers for them.) D. I hit save to create the container for the Board of Commissioners District 1. E. To navigate back to the county page, I went to the top of the page and clicked the Bent link on the parents line just above the category. F. Repeat A - E for each legislator. 3. Go back and add the races A. Just as easy as clicking on the containers you created and going to the page for the office. B. Add Race. C. Repeat for each new container. Other tips I find that I'm prone to make some errors when I'm entering in lots of races. I reccomend taking the step doing a Data Quality check before leaving the County. My Data Quality Checklist is something like this. - Make Sure office type and race in sync (Sheriff is correct for the race Bent County - Sheriff. When you go quickly sometimes you might accidentally re-use the last office that was in the add race since this is the default.) https://www.ourcampaigns.com/RaceDetail.html?RaceID=882273 - Check Poll open and Poll close dates and times. - Check Term Start and End Dates - Did I check a winner? - Precincts - For this I usually put 1 and 1 if I don't the specifics. - Did I check the certified results box (I check this for historical races since that is generally assumed to be true). - Did I cite my source. Hope all this helps.

So in an act of self-punishment, I decided to start on Georgia. You are a braver soul than I. Wyoming is done. Also organized the municipalities and added map data for cities and towns.

Indy Georgia I think you were asking me about possible sources for county level election results in Georgia. I believe I find a source playing around with the Scytl/Clarity Elections URL I used for finding Colorado results. Enter in the following URL Formula results.enr.clarityelections. com / XX / County_Name/ Remove the spaces and put in the GA for the XX and then the county name. If the county is two words, use the underscore between the two words. For example, here is Dodge County Georgia http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/GA/Dodge/ It goes back to 2012. I haven't checked all counties, but I have spot checked. Even small counties like Taliaferro have the results up. http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/GA/Taliaferro/ Also for others looking to find possible results in a state, it might be worth it to try to see if that Secretary of State has contracted Scytl software (makers of Clarity) to manage their state results using the same URL formula cutting of the county results.enr.clarityelections. com / XX /

That's awesome! Thanks so much!

yeah, I just realized that feature a few days ago because South Carolina's site redesign made it difficult to find the results for a special election (the results were on the Clarity page though)

I'm going to call Florida done in spite of Seminole County not having the 2016 results available online. Which in this day and age I can only think could be malfeasance or incompetence. I organized the cities into City, Town, Village, Census Designated Area and Unincorporated and got rid of extras that Wikipedia didn't list. I added all the city maps per county. Added links to the websites for all the constitutional offices and graphics/logos if they were available. Tried to find commissioner district maps where I could. Did not yet add judicial or school board races. FL is irritating in that they do not have any information whatsoever about uncontested races.

So another issue has presented itself - some of the counties have commissioners that represent districts, but they are elected county-wide. So the maps that show the elections results by district aren't exactly accurate. Wondering if I need to do something about that - like make Maps or MapLocations have an option for non-vote areas or something. And how/if to display the results.

I put the Seminole County website into the Wayback Machine and I couldn't find anything listed from 2016. But I did find that they had the ability to translate the Seminole County elections site into Klingon. As for Florida and unopposed races. Yeah, that's sorta at the mercy of the county having a candidate filings page that could mention which candidates are unopposed. Kansas City's city council has 6 districts where there's a member elected by only the people in the district and there's an at-large member elected from the district. If I ever found a shapefile for Kansas City's council, my quick instinct would be to have the districts for the in-district but not for the at-large.

Oh, and I put some general information on the county page that I though would be nice/useful to have. https://www.ourcampaigns.com/ContainerDetail.html?ContainerID=2578

Slightly OT: I have organized the CO municipalities (Cities, Towns, Census Designated Places, Unincorporated and Ghost Towns) and added the maps for them (Cities, Towns, CDPs).

Speaking of which, the US Census Bureau has the municipality maps for 2019 all available here per state: https://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/geo/shapefiles/index.php?year=2019&layergroup=Places They download as shapefile zips. You can take those and use this online tool https://geoconverter.hsr.ch/vector to convert them to .kml files, which are the easiest to use to put into OurCampaigns.

NOTE: Use LIBKML and not KML in the tool or all the Lat/Lon coordinates will be backwards.

If the smaller counties in Michigan dont have the data on the web i suggest contacting the county clerk. They are supposed to keep the records of county elections. Although I would wait until after the august primary, they are all swamped with absentee ballots administration now.

They are hit and miss. I don't think I'm going to have the time to bother with contacting the county clerks themselves, so feel free if you want to do so.