SLPresElection

How to engage with “SLPresElection” the first time ?

## Installing the package from GitHub
devtools::install_github("Amalan-ConStat/SLPresElection")

## Installing the package from CRAN
install.packages("SLPresElection")

Key Phrases

Presidential Election
District
Electorate
Postal Votes
Displaced Votes
Total No of Valid Votes (Total Valid)
No of Rejected Votes (Total Rejected)
Total No of Votes Polled (Total Polled)
No of Registered Electors (Total Registered)

#Load necessary packages
library(SLPresElection); library(ggplot2); library(dplyr); 
library(viridisLite); library(ggthemr); ggthemr("flat dark")

What does “SLPresElection” ?

The eight presidential election results of Sri Lanka from 1982 to 2019 are available in the election commission website as pdf files. However, through pdf scraping these results are available as csv files because of my pet project. These csv files are available as data-frames in this R package.

Something to ponder on the tables in these pdf files

Total Polled = Total Valid + Total Rejected
Total Valid = Votes casted to Candidate $A$ + $...$ + Votes casted to Candidate $Z$
Total Polled $%$ = (Total Polled/ Total Registered) * $100$
Total Valid $%$ = (Total Valid/ Total Polled) * $100$
Total Rejected $%$ = (Total Rejected/ Total Polled) * $100$
Candidate $i$ $%$ = (Candidate A/ Total Polled ) * $100$

Data preparation articles

Eight vignettes describe the extraction and preparation of the presidential election datasets for 1982, 1988, 1994, 1999, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2019. They document count corrections, percentage calculations, missing-value handling, and label harmonisation where applicable. The 2019 article also includes the initial OCR prompt, corrections to missing and misplaced result tables, and the registered-elector discrepancies retained in the data.

# List the available package vignettes
browseVignettes("SLPresElection")

# Open the 2019 data preparation article
vignette("election-2019", package = "SLPresElection")

Just a glimpse

Election1982 %>% 
  subset(ColNames=="No of Registered Electors" & Electorate=="Final District Results"| 
         ColNames=="Total No of Votes Polled" & Electorate=="Final District Results")  %>% 
  group_by(District,ColNames) %>%
  summarise(Votes=sum(Votes)/100000) %>%
  ungroup(District,ColNames) %>%
  ggplot(.,aes(x=District,y=Votes,fill=ColNames,label=round(Votes,4)))+
  ylab("Votes (in 100,000)")+xlab("District")+
  geom_col(position = "dodge")+
  geom_text(vjust=-1,size=3)+
  theme(legend.position = "bottom",
        axis.text.x = element_text(angle=45,vjust=1.2,hjust=1.1))+
  scale_fill_viridis_d()+
  ggtitle("For 1982 the registered and polled votes for all districts")

Final_Data<-rbind.data.frame(Election1982,Election1988,Election1994,Election1999,
                             Election2005,Election2010,Election2015,Election2019)
years<-unique(Final_Data$Year)

Final_Data %>%
  subset(ColNames=="No of Registered Electors" & Electorate=="Final District Results" | 
           ColNames=="Total No of Votes Polled" & Electorate=="Final District Results") %>%
  group_by(Year,ColNames) %>%
  summarise(Votes=sum(Votes)/100000) %>%
  ungroup(Year,ColNames) %>%
  ggplot(.,aes(Year,Votes,color=ColNames,label=Votes))+
  ylab("Votes (in 100,000)")+
  geom_point(size=3.5)+geom_line(linewidth=2)+
  geom_text(vjust=-1.25,size=4)+
  scale_x_continuous(breaks = years)+
  theme(legend.position = "bottom")+scale_color_viridis_d()+
  ggtitle("The registered and polled votes for all eight elections")

Final_Data %>%
  subset(ColNames=="No of Rejected Votes" & Electorate=="Final District Results") %>%
  group_by(Year,ColNames) %>%
  summarise(Votes=sum(Votes)/100000) %>%
  ungroup(Year,ColNames) %>%
  ggplot(.,aes(Year,Votes,label=Votes))+
  geom_col()+geom_text(vjust=1)+
  ylab("Votes (in 100,000)")+
  scale_x_continuous(breaks = years)+
  theme(legend.position = "bottom")+scale_color_viridis_d()+
  ggtitle("No of Rejected Votes Over the Years")

Conclusion

Complete information about how the data was scraped from the pdf files are available at the github repository Presidential Election Data. Read this blog post “Extract Presidential Election Data of 2015 from the Pdf file” for a clear picture of how to scrape the data from pdf files. Results of all elections occured in Sri Lanka are available at the Election Commission website