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Process Postal Vote Application Data by Party

Source: R/process_pva_party.R
process_pva_party.Rd

Standardises and transforms Postal Vote Application (PVA) data for a single Australian federal election event into a consistent structure. This function aligns column names across election years (2010, 2013, 2016, 2019), calculates totals for Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) applications (online and paper) and combined AEC-plus-party applications, and ensures a uniform set of columns. For unrecognised election years, the data is returned unprocessed with a message.

Usage

process_pva_party(data, event)

Arguments

data

A data frame containing PVA data for a single election event. Must include an event column with a single unique value (e.g., "2010 Federal Election", "2013 Federal Election", "2016 Federal Election", "2019 Federal Election"). Additional required columns vary by year:

  • 2010: Enrolment, and party-specific columns (e.g., Labor, Liberal, AEC).

  • 2013: Enrolment Division, and additional party columns (e.g., Liberal-National).

  • 2016 and 2019: State_Cd, PVA_Web_1_Party_Div, and AEC-specific columns (e.g., AEC - OPVA).

A date column is optional.

event

A character string specifying the election event to process. Recognised values are "2010 Federal Election", "2013 Federal Election", "2016 Federal Election", or "2019 Federal Election". Other values result in the data being returned unprocessed.

Value

A data frame with standardised columns for recognised election years:

  • date (the date of the election or data snapshot)

  • event (the election event)

  • StateAb (state abbreviation, upper case; "ZZZ" for NA in 2013)

  • DivisionNm (division name)

  • GPV (general postal voter applications; included for 2013, 2016, 2019 only)

  • AEC (Online) (AEC online applications; included for 2013, 2016, 2019 only)

  • AEC (Paper) (AEC paper applications; included for 2013, 2016, 2019 only)

  • AEC (Total) (sum of AEC online and paper applications; all years)

  • Total (AEC + Parties) (sum of AEC total and party applications; all years except 2010)

  • ALP (Australian Labor Party applications; all years)

  • CLP (Country Liberal Party applications; all years)

  • DEM (Australian Democrats applications; 2019 only)

  • GRN (Greens applications; 2010, 2013, 2016 only)

  • LIB (Liberal Party applications; all years)

  • LNP (Liberal National Party applications; 2013, 2016, 2019 only)

  • NAT (National Party applications; all years)

  • OTH (Other party applications; all years)

For unrecognised years, the original data frame is returned unchanged.

Details

This function processes PVA data by:

  1. Standardising column names across recognised election years using rename_cols():

    • 2010: Enrolment to DivisionNm, party names (e.g., Labor to ALP).

    • 2013: Enrolment Division to DivisionNm, additional party names (e.g., Liberal-National to LNP).

    • 2016 and 2019: State_Cd to StateAb, PVA_Web_1_Party_Div to DivisionNm, AEC columns (e.g., AEC - OPVA to AEC (Online)).

  2. Handling missing states: For 2013, NA in StateAb is replaced with "ZZZ".

  3. Filtering rows: For 2010 and 2013, rows with NA in DivisionNm (e.g., notes or totals) are removed.

  4. Calculating totals: For 2013, 2016, and 2019:

    • AEC (Total) is the sum of AEC (Online) and AEC (Paper).

    • Total (AEC + Parties) is the sum of AEC (Total) and all party columns present.

  5. Column selection: Selects and reorders columns to a consistent set, retaining only those present in the data.

  6. Formatting: Converts StateAb to uppercase.

  7. Unrecognised years: Returns the data unprocessed with an informative message.

The function assumes the input data frame contains the required columns for the specified event year and that the event column matches the event argument.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
# Sample 2010 data
data_2010 <- data.frame(
  date = "2010-08-21",
  event = "2010 Federal Election",
  StateAb = "VIC",
  Enrolment = "Melbourne",
  Labor = 120,
  Liberal = 180,
  AEC = 60
)
process_pva_party(data_2010, "2010 Federal Election")

# Sample 2013 data with NA in State
data_2013 <- data.frame(
  date = "2013-08-21",
  event = "2013 Federal Election",
  StateAb = NSW,
  `Enrolment Division` = "Sydney",
  `Liberal-National` = 150,
  `AEC - OPVA` = 25,
  `AEC - Paper` = 15,
  check.names = FALSE
)
process_pva_party(data_2013, "2013 Federal Election")

# Sample invalid year
data_2022 <- data.frame(event = "2022 Federal Election", StateAb = "QLD", Votes = 90)
process_pva_party(data_2022, "2022 Federal Election")
} # }