Ridings
- Jonathan Schmale
Ridings are your electoral geographic divisions and are also known as electoral districts.
Elector may come pre-installed with federal or provincial riding information. Riding names can change due to boundary adjustments or when existing names do not sufficiently represent a district's geographic boundaries. You can add ridings in Elector at any time as needed.
Add a Riding
From the Home page, select Content Management > Add Riding.
Then specify Riding information and click Add Now. The following table describes each of the fields.
Riding Information | Details |
|---|---|
Riding ID | Every riding is assigned a unique and official identifier for federal and provincial elections - usually starting at 1 and incrementing. |
Riding Region | A geographical grouping of ridings you define to review cross-sectional election data based on what is relevant to your viewers. For example, in an Ontario election, you may want a region called Metro Toronto or a Central Ontario region that runs through Lake Simcoe and the Muskokas. Select an existing region from the list. Or, enter a new region by typing the name of the region in the field. You can select multiple regions to assign to a single riding. Examples:
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Riding Name (English) Riding Name (French) | Some ridings, especially those with large numbers of both francophone and anglophone voters, may be named or punctuated differently in English and French. For example, the Manitoba riding of Saint Boniface is referred to in French as "Saint-Boniface", with a hyphen. |
Broadcast Name | Optional. |
Line1 | Optional. |
Polls in Riding | The number of polls in the riding. Automatic data feeds can report the number of polls counted and reporting once the polls close, and these metrics can be part of your broadcast output. When creating a new riding, this value is not required. |
Polls Close | This is the time of day that the polls will close |
Incumbent Party | The current party that is assigned to the riding as of dissolution. |
Elected Party | The party who won this riding in the selected election date. Used to generate an overall party results summary with overall seat change and overall vote percent change for a specific region. Displayed as a graph in Flow or output as blade data. |
Riding Notes | Descriptive text known as an insight about the riding, such as geographical characteristics and riding borders, population demographics, industry details, and other noteworthy information. You can apply some basic text formatting options to the insight text as needed. For example, the Niagara Falls riding notes could include: "A mix of urban and rural, this long, narrow riding is home to a grape-growing and wine-making industry that makes up a large part of the area's manufacturing sector. The riding includes Niagara Falls, Niagara-on-the-Lake and, in the west, part of city of Thorold. The borders for this riding run from Lake Ontario in north to the city limits of Niagara Falls in the south. To the west, it begins at the Welland Canal and it stretches to the Niagara River in the east. Tourism is key here, thanks to Niagara Falls and the Shaw Festival." |
Is New | Check the checkbox if this is a new riding that didn't exist in the previous election. |
Electors | Specify the number of eligible voters in this riding. |
Candidates of Interest | Used by automated graphics systems to know how many candidates to display from this riding when presenting a riding result summary. |
Mail-in Ballots | Specifies the number of Mail-in ballots received in this riding. Also is displayed in the Results Summary riding popup to help with results analysis. |
Expected Turnout | The estimated number of voters who will vote in this riding in this election. These values can then be used in charts instead of the poll percent (when enabled in System Preferences: |
Manage Existing Ridings
You can view and manage ridings in Elector at any time.
From the Homepage, click or select Content Management > Manage Ridings.
Click the Edit (pencil) button to open the Riding Details form.
Make your changes and press the Save button.
Action | Description |
|---|---|
Data Source toggle | To switch a riding from automated to manual data sources you can use the toggle button in this column when visible. Admins only and requires the System Preference |
Remove Riding | Removing a riding is a permanent action that cannot be undone. Click the Remove ❌ button to remove the riding. |
Sort Riding List | Click on a column header to sort in ascending or descending or default order. By default, the sort order is by Riding ID. Sorting the displayed table in Flow does not affect broadcast output. |
Filter Riding List | You can filter the list of ridings by:
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View Candidates | Displays a candidate count for that riding. Click on the arrow icon to view all of the candidates for that riding. |
Watch Riding | Flag a riding for a watch list, such as your own Personal Watch List or a public or private Named Watch List. You can access watch lists when reviewing election status and candidate information. Click on the Watch icon to toggle between these states: Not watching the riding Add riding to Watchlist Watching the riding Stop watching the riding
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Review Riding Insight | Click on the Insight icon to review riding insights in a popup window.
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Navigate Ridings List | Flow may display the list of ridings across multiple pages.
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Generating Optional Riding Names
Elector now supports the optional Broadcast, Line 1 and Line 2 fields for riding names to give you options of how to display a riding name.
To give yourself a quick start on using them after you have imported all your ridings there is a feature in the Riding Management module to assist you by auto-generating suggested values for each of the Broadcast, Line 1 and Line 2 fields. Simply select your options and click the Generate button.
How It works
Broadcast names - are simply a copy of the existing name.
Line 1 and Line 2 - are generated by fitting as much of the original name in line 1 using the target length and putting the rest on line 2. It does this by breaking the names into pieces on word boundaries (punctuation, whitespace) and then fitting as many of those pieces into line 1 without exceeding the target length. The rest are put into line 2.
It is expected that you may have to adjust a few manually to achieve ideal results for specific riding.
Overwrite existing names option - If it is turned on then it will generate ALL new names for ALL ridings. If this is turned off - then only EMPTY name values will be filled by the generator for ALL ridings. This allows you to pre-fill the name values for specific ridings where you want to control the name values yourself directly and then generate the rest after.
Generating Expected Turnout Values
This option identifies ridings having no Expected Turnout value and shows the value it would apply.
How It works
It looks for the previous riding based on either a single historical riding connection or by finding a riding of the same name. Then it uses the total votes from that election as the suggested value for the current election’s expected turnout value.
If a riding is associated with multiple previous ridings then it won’t suggest a value in this bulk update.
Check Now - press the Check Now button to look for ridings that it could generate a value for.
Apply Values - Then press the Apply Values button to save these values to the ridings.