Precinct name needs clean up

[joshuakalla]

I am looking at the precinct names for 2016-precinct-president.csv using Version 9.0 downloaded from https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/LYWX3D. The precinct names for Wood County, Texas are appearing as dates (e.g., 1-Apr) when they should be numeric (e.g., 1-4, see https://elections.mywoodcounty.com/voter-information/precinct-maps/). I believe this is just an Excel issue where certain numbers get reformatted as dates. But how the data was saved in both the CSV and RDA files mean the precinct name is showing up incorrectly. Not sure how widespread this issue is or whether there are other weird Excel reformats.

[jamesdunham]

Thanks @joshuakalla, I'd come across this too, and it's fixed for our next release in a couple of days.

As you know, this happens when someone opens and then saves a CSV using Excel. We no longer rely on this kind of manual intervention in our workflow, as a rule, in part for exactly this reason.

[joshuakalla]

Thanks! And thank you for doing this fantastic public service!

[joshuakalla]

Another quick question @jamesdunham about the next release: will you be adding more coverage of the State House results from Texas? It looks like there is only coverage for 69 of the 150 seats.

[jamesdunham]

We have precinct returns only for the State House seats in Texas that were contested. They don't seem to be available for unchallenged candidates. I think we'll add the jurisdiction-level (best available) totals instead, for the sake of completeness.