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Process Election Data for Elected Candidates

Source: R/process_elected.R
process_elected.Rd

Standardises election data related to elected candidates for a single Australian federal election event. This function aligns column names across datasets, specifically processing the 2004 election year by standardising the Elected column with "Y" or "N" values. For all other election years, the data is returned unprocessed with a message. Applies to datasets including "National list of candidates" (House and Senate), "First preferences by candidate by vote type" (House only), "Two candidate preferred by candidate by vote type" (House only), "Two candidate preferred by candidate by polling place" (House only), and "Distribution of preferences by candidate by division" (House only).

Usage

process_elected(data, event)

Arguments

data

A data frame containing election data for a single election event. Must include an event column with a single unique value (e.g., "2004"). Additional columns depend on the specific dataset.

event

A character string specifying the election event to process. Currently, only "2004 Federal Election" is processed; other values result in the data being returned unprocessed.

Value

A data frame. For the 2004 Federal Election, it contains the standardised column:

  • Elected (indicates if the candidate was elected, with values "Y" for yes or "N" for no)

along with all other input columns. For unrecognised years, the original data frame is returned unchanged.

Details

This function processes election data by:

  1. Formatting: Converts Elected values to "Y" (elected) or "N" (not elected), replacing NA with "N".

  2. Unrecognised years: Returns the data unprocessed with an informative message for years other than the 2004 Federal Election.

The function assumes the input data frame contains the required columns for the specified event year and dataset, with processing currently implemented only for the 2004 Federal Election. Future enhancements may include adding HistoricVote data for the 2004 Federal Election (pending identification of the source dataset).

Examples

# Sample 2004 data
data_2004 <- data.frame(
  date = "2004-10-09",
  event = "2004 Federal Election",
  CandidateID = 123,
  Elected = "#"
)
process_elected(data_2004, "2004 Federal Election")
#> Processing `2004 Federal Election` data to ensure all columns align across all elections.
#>         date                 event CandidateID Elected
#> 1 2004-10-09 2004 Federal Election         123       Y

# Sample unprocessed year (e.g., 2010)
data_2010 <- data.frame(
  date = "2010-08-21",
  event = "2010 Federal Election",
  CandidateID = 456,
  Elected = "Y"
)
process_elected(data_2010, "2010 Federal Election")
#> No processing required for `2010 Federal Election`. Data returned unprocessed.
#>         date                 event CandidateID Elected
#> 1 2010-08-21 2010 Federal Election         456       Y