Maemo.org team/Generating election results

Instructions for generating election results once an election is completed.


 * 1) Go to http://maemo.org/vote/
 * 2) Click on election link - get to http://maemo.org/vote/results.php?election_id=8
 * 3) Click on "List of all votes" - http://maemo.org/vote/votes.php?election_id=8
 * 4) Click on "Download the ballots": http://maemo.org/vote/blt.php?election_id=8
 * 5) Browser proposes open or save - save the file (election.blt)
 * 6) Launch OpenSTV.py (version 1.5 is latest as of writing) (downloaded from http://www.openstv.org/)
 * 7) File->New election
 * 8) Load election.blt file - Method: Fractional transfer STV
 * 9) Election options: Seat number = number of desired elected candidates (1 for referendum, 5 for council, etc); Threshold = Droop, Static, Whole; Delay surplus transfer = Off; Batch elimination = Zero; click OK
 * 10) Election results generated - you can see the winners & count details. To generate HTML version: Results->Save results as HTML - save file election_results.html
 * 11) Edit HTML file to take care of MySQL formating (escape quotes, backslashes, etc) and remove HTML headers - manual process
 * 12) * remove and ,
 * 13) * change into
 * 14) * sed/\'center\'/\"center\"/g
 * 15) * Ensure HTML attributes are quoted (colspan, rowspan, border, cellspacing)
 * 16) * Massage output as necessary (removing "symbols are elected" for characters survey, replacing characters with HTML entities, etc)
 * 17) Insert results in non-production database to test:
 * mysql -uelection -p election
 * $ insert into election_results values (8 , '');
 * 1) Check that results display correctly, and massage results field if needed.
 * 2) Dump insert from non-prod DB to send for insertion in prod DB (as an SQL statement, to make it as easy as possible - ensures quoting & character escaping is done correctly):
 * mysqldump -uelection -p -t -w 'election_results.election_id=8' election election_results > results.sql
 * 1) On production database, mysql -u -p < results.sql