Jeff Hortin

INFX 543 Final Project Part B Political Consulting

Instructor: Bob Larson 12/9/2010

Final Part B: Analysis of Voter Behavior Database



The following slides follow my development of a relational database used to record and analyze political data: Voter Information: Name, Primary ID info, and other important variables for analysis of voter activity. Surveys: Political consultants often use surveys to engage voters and analyze public opinion.

Final Part B: Analysis of Voter Behavior Database (more tables)

 

Political Data: Personal details; connected to Voter_ID in a 1-1 relationship. Election Data: Detailed voter information available through local secretary of state office or county clerk. This information is distributed to research institutions and political consultants based on a signed agreement to maintain the privacy of voter information.

Problem Definition


Helping a small community-based organization track surveys and political behavior data among their constituents. Starting with great deal of data about voters (sometimes multiple voters per household, which may need to be another distinction in my E-R model), I am trying to describe all available information, such as past voting history, responses to a number of surveys, and more. There is one voter to many surveys, just as there is one voter to many elections.

E-R Diagram
VOTER_INFO (VOTER_ID INT (PK), LNAME CHAR(20), FNAME CHAR(15), SEX CHAR(1), TELEPHONE CHAR(10), EMAIL CHAR(25) PARTY CHAR(1)

This is what I imagined when formulating my project for Part A.

SURVEYS SURVEY_ID INT (PK), RESPONSE1 BIT(1), RESPONSE2 BIT(1), RESPONSE3 VARCHAR(180), VOTER_ID INT

POLITICAL_DATA VOTER_ID INT (PK), STREET CHAR(15), STATE CHAR(2), CITY CHAR(10), ZIP CHAR(5)

ELECTION_DATA ELECTION_ID DATE, VOTER_ID INT, GOV CHAR(1), LT_GOV CHAR(1), MAYOR CHAR(1), JUDGE1 CHAR(1), JUDGE2 CHAR(2)

Voter_Info create and select *

Surveys insert into

Political_Data

Here is some information that is In a one-to-one relationship with Voter_Info. Perhaps poorly named, this info is primarily for mailing, not really political per se.

Election_Data


This table has its problems: it is the only table I tried experimenting and importing from an Excel table. As you can see, that led to an error with the worksheet name: election_data$

Election_Data continued


And where I carefully defined the variables in the other three tables as described in the E-R Diagram, this table has a bunch of poorly defined variables that Ill need to go in an ALTER manually.