DINAcon Awards Nominee

Echtzeitdaten Abstimmungs- und Wahlergebnisse im OGD-Portal (unofficial name)

Project Category: #3 Best Practice

The official provisional results of Swiss referenda (on a municipal level) are being collected at the source – the cantons – and transferred via a secure data exchange tool (sedex) to the Federal Statistical Office (FSO) where they are automatically treated, controlled and published almost real-time via the opendata.swiss-portal. The data are in an easy to reuse format (JSON) and accompanied by the relevant metadata in several national languages (i.e. title and type of the referendum as well as a short explication of the vote at hand). The data are published on vote Sundays from noon and available to everybody at the same time.

The data is used in numerous applications developed by others. Among them are the mobile app “VoteInfo” by the Swiss Federal Chancellery/Statistical Office of the canton of Zurich/FSO, the Political Atlas of Switzerland (FSO) and by several media outlets for their coverage of referenda and elections (TA-Media, Keystone-sda). Furthermore, the political-science-community has produced several R-scripts based on the data. For the federal elections 2019 a similar offer is being set up. This part will go live on 20th October. In the meantime, testing data are available via opendata.swiss.

 

Why should this Project win a DINAcon Award?

For the first time for Switzerland as a whole, real-time vote results by municipality for federal and cantonal referenda are available via opendata.swiss in an easily reusable format (JSON), accompanied by the relevant metadata and an archive of past referenda, dating back to 1981. The same service is planned for the federal elections 2019.