Elections PEI API

With Municipal Elections coming up in Charlottetown, Cornwall, Stratford and Summerside this fall, we’ve spent some time renovating the Municipal Elections section of the Elections PEI website. What once was a rabbit’s warren of various pages hung on various URL schemes has been consolidated into a well-organized and comprehensive set of pages that offer access to all of the data on each municipality that Elections PEI maintains.

For example, on Municipalities page you’ll find a list of all 75 municipalities on the Island.

Click any municipality – say, Souris – and you’ll see contact information and a map of municipal boundaries and, for the four municipalities for which Elections PEI conducts elections – like Charlottetown – and you’ll see a list of wards and a ward boundaries map.

And so on: look at a ward, like Queens Square, and you see a list of polls and a poll boundaries map; look at a poll, like Hensley Street, and you’ll see a map of the poll along with information on where to vote and how to contact the returning officer.

All of this arrange in a friendly set of increasingly-more-specific URLs:

• http://www.electionspei.ca/municipalities
• http://www.electionspei.ca/municipalities/charlottetown
• http://www.electionspei.ca/municipalities/charlottetown/ward1
• http://www.electionspei.ca/municipalities/charlottetown/ward1/poll2

All of the maps referenced by these pages are available in KML form and the “master” maps of boundaries are available in ESRI Shapefile format.

The really neat thing (at least if you’re a programmer or developer) is that you can stick an “xml” in those URLs and get exactly the same information in XML format:

• http://www.electionspei.ca/xml/municipalities
• http://www.electionspei.ca/xml/municipalities/charlottetown
• http://www.electionspei.ca/xml/municipalities/charlottetown/ward1
• http://www.electionspei.ca/xml/municipalities/charlottetown/ward1/poll2

This means that citizens now have “programmatic access” to municipality information. Meaning that if you want to develop an iPhone application lists polling station locations, or a maps mashup that uses polling division boundaries, you’ll now have all the data you need.

This is a work-in-progress; watch electionspei.ca/api for documentation and information about changes and extensions.