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User:SnowFire/USCongressResults

< User:SnowFire

Please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. Congress#Results tables for districts and representatives if you're interested in helping add these tables to various district and congressperson articles. These were automatically generated from the Clerk's result tables, so errors can be due both due to parser error and due the Clerk being unspecific.

Also, now with the 2006 results! Finally.

List:

Usage notes edit

If you're adding these tables to a specific candidate/congressperson's page, the first thing to note is that the wikilink to the subject's name should be removed. It's not a big deal if the person won all their elections, but if they didn't, MediaWiki interprets a self-wikilink as "make this bold." This will cause a losing candidate to be improperly bolded if it's their own article.

Another concern is the number of third party candidates. It's not a huge deal, but 5 or more candidates in one election will tend to force a horizontal scrollbar and extend beyond the reaches of the normal text. Candidates with laughably few votes are automatically stuck at the bottom by the parser, but sometimes it makes sense to do it by hand for a few others, too. So... if, out of 5 elections, only one of them had 5 candidates and the 5th candidate got only a small portion of the votes, consider removing the column, sticking an asterisk at the end of the row, and adding that candidate to the "Minor candidates and write-ins" note at the bottom. This is what was done for Ohio's 13th, for example, in the Sherrod Brown article; Werner J. Lange was the only 5th candidate, so he got booted to the bottom manually. If there's a ton of candidates anyway, then one way to eliminate the screen scroll is to add wrap the table with <div style="overflow: auto; width: 98%;"> and </div>. This can be seen at, say, Gordon Smith.

For politicians with short articles whose infobox would interfere with the table, a <div style="clear:right;"><div> above the section header should do the trick for getting it to display beneath it (see the William J. Hughes article, for example).

If a Congressperson held office before 1992... well, you can calculate the data by hand from the PDFs the Clerk's office has or various other Internet sources, or you can just toss a {{listdev}} template on it.

Lastly, don't forget to change the date in the header if chopping off any years.

Parser notes edit

The parser naively assumes that the entire name given by the Clerk's office should be used and wikilinked. This means silly entries like Howard P. "Buck" McKeon rather than Howard McKeon and wikilinks going off to wholly unrelated pages (like for Robert MacDonald, a losing challenger in a random Alamaba race). It also never wikilinks third party candidates; this is generally correct, but a few of them *are* notable (Bernie Sanders, for instance), so yeah. Some candidates names inexplicably change over time causing inconsistency in the table, which also needs to be corrected (Tom Tancredo vs. Thomas G. Tancredo, for instance).

This wholly ignores changes in the middle of office. Watch out for names that get mangled or otherwise are too late. Additionally, some {{nowrap}}s may be appropriate for third party candidates; a name like "William D. Johnston III" (in Maryland-5) looks kinda silly on four lines, so nowrapping "FirstName Initial." and "LastName Suffix" may well be appropriate.

The current parser considers anyone who got fewer than 550 votes "minor" and only worthy of a footnote rather than an entry in the table. This threshold can certainly be adjusted, generally upward when there's one annoying election stretching the entire table with irrelevant extra candidates. Also, some write-ins beg for further explanation; Massachusetts has several races in which an entity simply called "write-ins" are getting 20%+ of the vote, yet the clerk's office doesn't explain whose name was on those write-ins. It took some investigative work to turn out that it was Terry Baum who was the write-in in the 2004 election of Nancy Pelosi's district, for example. Another example would be Colorado-4, where write-ins are listed as gaining 4,539 votes, which pretty strongly implies that there was a real candidate campaigning who should be listed instead. There are other bits of random strangeness lying about as well - Bud Shuster and a few other early Pennsylvania types are listed with parties "Republican, Democrat" in the '92 and '94 elections. Did he have the nomination of both parties, or what? Rarely, the Clerk's office is just wrong, such as when Chuck Hagel's write-in opponents (which really did exist) are inexplicably completely ignored in the clerk's version.

The parser currently gets into serious trouble for states in which candidates can run on multiple parties, like New York and Connecticut. I may give a shot at fixing this in the future, but the actual results should hopefully clarify which candidate got "A Connecticut Party"'s votes and all. James H. Maloney's page should hopefully serve as a decent example as to how to deal with candidates running on multiple party's platforms, but that was done by hand. Ick.

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