We're in the middle of a Federal election here in Australia, and many of us have been following the ABC news reports enthusiastically.
This has me wondering, why is it that we must turn to the ABC directly for summary statistics? Why can't the electoral commission publish raw data directly to be analyzed by any third parties?
If it is reasonable to do so, do you know of any countries which make this data available?
EDIT:
I understand that for many elections this is the case, but for ranked-choice voting this data is typically abstracted in a way that cannot be transformed into its original state. Here is an archive of some NSW elections which contain what I'm looking for, however this is not available by default. Here is a preview of one of these files:
$ head Data_NA_Albury.txt_ballots.txt
0, 1, 2, 3, 4
LAB,CDP,NLT,LIB,GRN
-+-+-+-+-
() : 22
(0) : 7060
(0,1) : 31
(0,1,2) : 13
(0,1,2,3) : 5
(0,1,2,3,4) : 362
(0,1,2,4) : 2
These are exact tallies for each preferential ballot. For example, if I voted in this election with preference (1:LAB, 2:CDP, 3:NLT, 4:LIB, 5:GRN), then I would have contributed 1 vote toward the total of 362.
In the case of ranked-choice elections, I haven't seen this data anywhere else. I wonder why it is not published officially?
