Dynamics of elections in Sofala

A few months ago, STAE published on its website1 the  results of the 2009 elections up to district level. This  happened more that 2 years after the elections and is  thus inexplicably late, given the fact that the transformation of the results databases in STAE to a publishable format is not an extremely complex endeavour. In  previous electoral cycles it also took unnecessarily  long to publish detailed results. It is a very welcome innovation that the STAE website now gives access to results from all elections (general  and municipal) since 1994. This simply did not exist  before. The 1994 results were, like all subsequent  election results, published in the official gazette  (Boletim da República), but the detail never goes  below the provincial level for general elections  (President and Parliament) and aggregated results for the municipal elections. Yet, for the 1994 elections  there was a hard copy publication of the results 2 up to  the level of each polling station (mesa). This publication must still be available in some libraries (public or  private), but it is certainly hard to get to and a printed  set of results is just not friendly for analysis. The 1999  and 2004 results were published on a CD-Rom. For  1999 the lowest level of detail is not the individual  polling table, but the aggregation per polling location  (typically the aggregated results of all the polling stations in one school). The 2004 results are the most  complete in electronic format as they disaggregate up  to polling station level. For 2009 this was not continued. The results are published up to district level,  which omits a lot of detail. Per district the result sheets  repeat multiple times the name of one party  (legislative) or candidate (presidential), but it is not  clear what level of aggregation each sub-result has. If  one wants to know how many votes, or what percentage of the votes a party/candidate obtained in a certain  district one needs to manually add up the different  imputations for each. The fact that there is no consistency in how the results  are presented over the various electoral processes  complicates analysis of the data that identifies and  explains trends in voting behaviour. The analysis of  election results over time remains a very labour intensive, artisanal job that on its turn is subject to mistakes. This is also due to the fact that results are only  in pdf format and can thus not be “worked” directly for  quantitative analysis. Read HERE.