Canadian Federal Elections

election is a small Rust program for processing vote data from Canadian Federal Elections.

After building, see election --help for the available options.

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Getting the Data
• Interpretting the Output
  • Party Results per Riding
  • Party Results per Riding (won seats only)
  • Per-party Totals
  • Average Win Ratios

Installation

You will need git and cargo installed. To fetch the code and build the election tool:

git clone [email protected]:fosskers/election.git
cd election
cargo build --release

Getting the Data

election currently supports election years 2008, 2011, 2015 and 2019, although 2008 and 2011 require manual conversion from LATIN to UTF-8 beforehand. 2021 will be supported as soon as the data is made public.

Federal election data can be found here. For example, to get the 2019 data, navigate as follows:

• 43rd General Election, October 21, 2019
• Go to the raw data version (for researchers)
• Canada / Provinces / Territories
• Canada (Poll-by-poll Results - Format 2)

You must use the Format 2 data.

Download this data and unzip its contents into data/2019/ within your clone of this repository. For example:

mkdir -p data/2019
cd data/2019
wget https://elections.ca/res/rep/off/ovr2019app/51/data_donnees/pollresults_resultatsbureauCanada.zip
unzip pollresults_resultatsbureauCanada.zip
rm pollresults_resultatsbureauCanada.zip

Interpretting the Output

All results are output as JSON. I use another tool, Nushell, to format the results into nice tables.

Party Results per Riding

For example, to see how the Rhinoceros Party (a joke party) did in each riding:

cargo run --release -- --party=rin | from json | reverse | first 10

───┬────────────────────────────────────┬───────┬─────────────────────┬───────────────┬───────┬────────┬───────
 # │               riding               │ party │      last_name      │  first_name   │ votes │ ratio  │  won
───┼────────────────────────────────────┼───────┼─────────────────────┼───────────────┼───────┼────────┼───────
 0 │ Beauce                             │ Rhino │ Bernier             │ Maxime        │ 1084  │ 0.0182 │ false
 1 │ Gaspésie--Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine │ Rhino │ Cowboy              │ Jay           │  353  │ 0.0091 │ false
 2 │ Calgary Signal Hill                │ Rhino │ Bassett             │ Christina     │  511  │ 0.0080 │ false
 3 │ Papineau                           │ Rhino │ Cacereco Berthiaume │ Jean-Patrick  │  363  │ 0.0071 │ false
 4 │ Chicoutimi--Le Fjord               │ Rhino │ Bélanger            │ Line          │  299  │ 0.0068 │ false
 5 │ Québec                             │ Rhino │ CoRhino             │ Sébastien     │  349  │ 0.0064 │ false
 6 │ Hochelaga                          │ Rhino │ Blais-Leduc         │ Chinook       │  314  │ 0.0059 │ false
 7 │ Rosemont--La Petite-Patrie         │ Rhino │ Lavoie              │ Jos Guitare   │  346  │ 0.0057 │ false
 8 │ Mégantic--L'Érable                 │ Rhino │ Roy                 │ Damien        │  256  │ 0.0053 │ false
 9 │ LaSalle--Émard--Verdun             │ Rhino │ Bélanger            │ Rhino Jacques │  265  │ 0.0050 │ false
───┴────────────────────────────────────┴───────┴─────────────────────┴───────────────┴───────┴────────┴───────

Party Results per Riding (won seats only)

The big parties have many more candidates than won seats. If we want to see just the victorious seats:

cargo run --release -- --party=grn | from json | where won | reverse

───┬───────────────────────┬─────────────┬───────────┬────────────┬───────┬────────┬──────
 # │        riding         │    party    │ last_name │ first_name │ votes │ ratio  │ won
───┼───────────────────────┼─────────────┼───────────┼────────────┼───────┼────────┼──────
 0 │ Saanich--Gulf Islands │ Green Party │ May       │ Elizabeth  │ 33454 │ 0.4908 │ true
 1 │ Nanaimo--Ladysmith    │ Green Party │ Manly     │ Paul       │ 24844 │ 0.3457 │ true
 2 │ Fredericton           │ Green Party │ Atwin     │ Jenica     │ 16640 │ 0.3367 │ true
───┴───────────────────────┴─────────────┴───────────┴────────────┴───────┴────────┴──────

Per-party Totals

Or perhaps we wish to see how every party did overall:

cargo run --release -- --total | from json | sort-by votes | reverse

────┬───────────────────────────────┬─────────┬────────┬───────
 #  │             party             │  votes  │ ratio  │ seats
────┼───────────────────────────────┼─────────┼────────┼───────
  0 │ Conservative                  │ 6239227 │ 0.3433 │  121
  1 │ Liberal                       │ 6018728 │ 0.3312 │  157
  2 │ New Democratic Party          │ 2903722 │ 0.1598 │  24
  3 │ Bloc Québécois                │ 1387030 │ 0.0763 │  32
  4 │ Green Party                   │ 1189607 │ 0.0654 │   3
  5 │ People's Party                │ 294092  │ 0.0161 │   0
  6 │ Independent                   │  72546  │ 0.0039 │   1
  7 │ Christian Heritage Party      │  18901  │ 0.0010 │   0
  8 │ Rhinoceros Party              │  9538   │ 0.0005 │   0
  9 │ Libertarian                   │  8367   │ 0.0004 │   0
 10 │ Veteran's Coalition           │  6300   │ 0.0003 │   0
 11 │ Animal Protection Party       │  4408   │ 0.0002 │   0
 12 │ Marxist-Leninist              │  4124   │ 0.0002 │   0
 13 │ Communist                     │  3905   │ 0.0002 │   0
 14 │ Pour l'Indépendance du Québec │  3815   │ 0.0002 │   0
 15 │ No Affiliation                │  1745   │ 0.0000 │   0
 16 │ PC Party                      │  1534   │ 0.0000 │   0
 17 │ Radical Marijuana             │   920   │ 0.0000 │   0
 18 │ Canada's Fourth Front         │   682   │ 0.0000 │   0
 19 │ United Party of Canada        │   602   │ 0.0000 │   0
 20 │ National Citizens Alliance    │   510   │ 0.0000 │   0
 21 │ Stop Climate Change           │   296   │ 0.0000 │   0
 22 │ Nationalist                   │   281   │ 0.0000 │   0
────┴───────────────────────────────┴─────────┴────────┴───────

Average Win Ratios

How good is each party at winning the seats they win? That is, regardless of how many seats they did actually win, in cases where they won, did they win by a large amount? We can find such average win ratios:

cargo run --release -- --party=blq | from json | where won | get ratio | math avg
0.448361485625

cargo run --release -- --party=ndp | from json | where won | get ratio | math avg
0.418011905

cargo run --release -- --party=grn | from json | where won | get ratio | math avg
0.39112569

So for the seats they won in 2019, the Bloc seemed to win by higher percentages than the NDP and the Greens.