March 2011 Archives
With 2011 Spring Town Meeting approaching, I've made a couple minor improvements to the page that displays tally vote results to better deal with the ever-growing number of votes in the database.
Previously, the results page showed descriptions of all the votes listed at the top of the page. This worked well when there were only a dozen or so votes, but now that the page may be displaying close to 100 votes, it was becoming unwieldy. Now, the vote descriptions are hidden by default, and you can access them by clicking the "Vote Descriptions" header at the top of the page.
In addition, the table of vote results extends horizontally far to the right with a large number of votes. To make it easier to keep track of which row you are looking at, I have added an extra column on the far right showing each member's name, which should reduce the amount of scrolling back and forth needed to view the results.
The tallyvotes.org database now includes historical data from the last decade of annual town elections, showing all candidates and election results for all townwide offices and all precinct-level Town Meeting seats.
This data can be accessed in several ways. The sidebar on the left-hand side of the home page now includes a section called Town Election History, which has an entry for each individual election. Each individual election, such as the 2008 election, has a page which lists all races in that election. Each individual race, such as the 2008 Select Board, or the 2006 Precinct 9 Town Meeting, has a page which shows details on that race, with full results and vote totals (pages for upcoming races just list the candidates for the race).
In addition, the Town Meeting member detail pages, such as my own, now include a section at the bottom showing the full electoral history for that person.
The historical election data, like the tally vote data, is based on information available on the town website (the elections page is here). The data available extends back into the early 1990s, but data prior to 2000 is incomplete. Additional details will be added to the database as more data becomes available.
