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

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

Getting the Data

Federal election data can be found here. election currently only supports 2019. 2021 will be supported as soon as the data is made public. 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.

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
────┴───────────────────────────────┴─────────┴────────┴───────