Geek alert: XML Archive Exit Poll & Election data

Geek alert: XML Archive Exit Poll & Election data
by ivote2004

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/5/201039/952

Fri Nov 5th, 2004 at 21:10:39 EDT

Will we let them cook the books, and then burn 'em before we can do our audit? Will we let them hide their tracks? Shred the evidence?
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Action #1: Archive everything relevant you can find online. Grab it while it's hot. Before it vanishes.

Download & archive all data; dont depend on URLs being stable.

Make local backup copies, on your own hard disk, and burn to CD. Before URLs no longer hold the content they hold now, please make your own local backup copies --- especially of exit poll data. We need plenty of grassroots people to have copies of data that can be used (sooner, or later) to reverse-engineer how this election was stolen. So grab snapshots of unofficial vote tallies, exit polls, and other forms of raw election-relevant data.

Sure, there is plenty that hasn't been made public, and plenty that hasn't made it to the web yet. Getting hold of that data is much harder, and there are great efforts underway to do exactly that -- see http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
and help them out any way you can.

But there is plenty of data which has been put on the web, and we need to secure it. In other words, even if unscrupulous officials delete the data or change the data that has been available at a given URL, we want to have our own snapshots of what had already been posted.

Let's catch them in the lie, and document it well.
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ACTION #2:

Data needs to be transformed from HTML, PDF, XLS, and other source formats into a neutral open format: XML.

And the XML files need to be uploaded & organized into a simple data repository web site, which needs to be hosted at multiple mirrored servers, with stable longterm URLs for access.

XSL stylesheets need to be crafted for different useful views upon the data repository.

Investigators and researchers should be able to access the XML raw to get the data for number crunching, while the rest of us should be able to see userfriendly views via the XSL styling.

(((that's a very highlevel strategy; architecture & details can be discussed below)))

Remember the Open Source maxim:

"Given enough eyeballs, all problems are shallow."

Therefore:
Secure the data.
Make the data available in a useful way.
Apply many eyeballs.
Reverse-engineer how we've been hacked.
Fix, before Dec 13, when the Electoral College performs the vote that really matters.