About

AuspolDB, in time, aims to be a publicly-accessible, free and open-source database of Australian Electoral data. This project began when I went on the Tally Room forums and was posed with a question: “Has a Federal election ever been held in the same month as a state election?” I thought “There must have been”. I luckily knew where I would easily be able to find my answer, as Wikipedia has a timeline of state and federal elections. Then the idea hit me. Hovering over each election and comparing the months manually took a bit of time. If I could query a database that had all this information, I could have answered it so much quicker. Not only that, but it has the advantage over Wikipedia's records (which, like AuspolDB, are sourced from Adam Carr's election archive and Antony Green's NSW election archive) that it can be searched and filtered through. Certainly, with both sites you could find all the results in an electorate, or find where a particular elected MP ran in a particular year, but what if you only knew a candidate's first name? What if you wanted to learn about unelected candidates, and where else they ran? What if you wanted to know what the most common first name is for candidates (John)? What if you wanted to know which party has run the most candidates with hyphenated names (The Greens, though Independents technically lead them)? The answers to all these questions and several more lie within the dataset. This site was built using CakePHP 4, and the data is stored on a MySQL database. There are certain inaccuracies in the data due to the original dataset's naming conventions for candidates. Certain candidates have their information scattered across different pages, despite all belonging to one person (Wilfred Kent Hughes is one example). There are also single pages that contain data for multiple people, such as Robert Katter, which contains information for Bob Katter Sr. and Jr., as they both appeared in the dataset with the same name (until 2004). Otherwise, I have gone to great lengths to ensure the integrity of the data, and am quite happy with the state it's in. I'd like to give a special thanks to Antony Green, who gave me access to NSW Legislative Council election results from 1978 to 1991 in a machine-readable format not previously available anywhere else (except in PDF form). You can download these results here. If you consider yourself technically inclined, you can download the dataset if you'd like to manipulate it in ways I hadn't considered, or just to run SQL statements on it. AuspolDB's dataset and source code is available on GitHub. You can find the GitHub repository here.

As for myself, I'm dugglez. I've got a keen interest in Australian politics, history and psephology. As you may have gathered, I also have a background in development. It's good to keep your skills and knowledge current, so when I came up with the idea after having not written much code for a few months, I was glad to have something to practice with. In my spare time, I sometimes produce documentaries on Australian politics and history. You can find my Youtube Channel here. You can write to me at dugglez@auspoldb.org