2016 MO Special Election Results

## RDH Date Retrieval
07/05/21

## RDH Upload Date
07/14/2021

## Sources
The RDH retrieved the 2016 special election results for Missouri from MEDSL - the MIT Election Data and Science Lab (https://electionlab.mit.edu/data).

## Fields

**Fields:**		**Descriptions:**

'year'			Year of election.
'stage'			The electoral stage, either gen for general elections or pri for primary elections.
'special'			Whether the election was a special election, either TRUE for special elections or FALSE otherwise, Source: Precinct returns for jurisdiction
'state'			State name.
'state_postal'			State U.S. Postal Service abbreviation (two-letter ISO 1366 code).
'state_fips'			Numeric state FIPS 5-2 code.
'state_icpsr'			Numeric ICPSR state code.
'county_name'			County name, Source: Census Bureau.
'county_fips'			Numeric FIPS 6-4 code, the concatenation of two-digit state_fips and three- digit county FIPS codes, Source: Census Bureau
'county_ansi'			County ANSI code, Source: Census Bureau
'county_lat'			County latitude (decimal degrees), Source: Census Bureau
'county_long'			County longitude (decimal degrees), Source: Census Bureau
'jurisdiction'			The name of the administrative jurisdiction, typically a county, as it appeared in source data, Source: Precinct returns for jurisdiction
'precinct'			The name of the precinct, as it appeared in source data, Source: Precinct returns for jurisdiction
'candidate'			The name of the candidate.Candidate names are standardized across jurisdictions.Source: Precinct returns for jurisdiction
'candidate_normalized'			A normalizing transformation of the candidate's name for joins by name. This is a single word from candidate, usually the last name, in lowercase. In the case of hyphenated names, only the final name is included. Source: MEDSL
'office'			The office for which the candidate ran, Source: Precinct returns for jurisdiction
'district'			District associated with the office, where applicable, Source: Precinct returns for jurisdiction
'writein'			Whether the record describes a write-in candidate, either TRUE or FALSE. Source: Precinct returns for jurisdiction
'party'			Party of the candidate, where applicable. Candidates may run on multiple party lines, so to compute two-party vote shares or candidate vote totals, aggregate over party. Party names are standardized across jurisdictions. Source: Precinct returns for jurisdiction
'mode'			Vote mode, e.g., mail or Election Day. Source: Precinct returns for jurisdiction
'votes'			Number of votes received. Source: Precinct returns for jurisdiction

## Processing Steps
The RDH used Python's Pandas library to separate MEDSL's election data files by state for 2016. For more information on MEDSL's data processing, see MEDSL's Github repository for 2016 returns (https://github.com/MEDSL/official-precinct-returns).

MEDSL Hosts 2016 election results separately by office. The RDH concatenated the dataframes in order to host one file by state. For more information on the processing by office, see MEDSL's Github linked above. 

Please contact info@redistrictingdatahub.org for more information.