Elector is designed to preserve your election data from election to election but if you are new to the solution or this is a new province, you will need to enter some data manually to help provide the context needed for Flow to display many of it's graphics.

Current Election Date

DO NOT START USING ELECTOR UNTIL THIS STEP HAS BEEN COMPLETED

Before you begin adding ridings and candidates into the Elector system you MUST set the Next Election Date preference key. It must be set for the upcoming election date either through the preferences module or in the config table. All data entered into the system is assigned this date for grouping purposes.

Adding Legacy Party Seat Data

Overall Results

For each legacy election you wish to add to the system, two additional records must be added to the party table for each party. The first record for a party represents the seats obtained during the last election. Set prt_leading value equal to the number of seats and set the prt_date value to the last election day. The second record you must add is the seats at dissolution. Set prt_leading value equal to the number of seats at dissolution for that party and set the prt_date value to be the date one day before the upcoming election.

Doing this will allow the Provincial Race Status module to properly display the graphs.

Regional Results

To enable calculating regional seat changes - you will want to create a copy of the ridings in the dissolution date. The easiest way to do this is to have an admin using the riding cloning tool in System Configuration. Once the ridings have been cloned/created in the Dissolution date you will need to assign a Elected Party to each riding which will be compared to the leading/elected party of ridings in the same region to identify an overal seat change for each party in the region.

Adding Legacy Candidate Vote Data

For each party that got votes during the last election, a record will need to be added to the candidate table that represents the number of votes that party got in total.

Add the party as the candidate last name, the year as the candidate first name, and the total number of votes in the last election for that party in the cnd_votes column. Put the number of seats they won in the cnd_elected column and connect the cnd_partyID to the party record you just added above that is from the last election (not dissolution). The cnd_date is then the date of the last election (not dissolution).

Doing this will allow the Seat Count graph in the views to properly represent the delta values from the last election (eg +/- number of votes/seats)