Virginia April Referendum — Absentee Ballot Tracker

Interactive dashboard hosted on GitHub Pages. Data is generated locally from INSTANCE-1 and pushed to this repo.

Repo structure

index.html                      ← the dashboard (single-file app)
build_absentee_json.py    ← run this locally to refresh data
data/
  summary.json                  ← statewide totals
  counties.json                 ← one row per county
  precincts.json                ← one row per county/precinct
  metadata.json                 ← last_updated timestamp + source

First-time setup

1. Create a GitHub repo (e.g. va-absentee)
2. Copy all files from this starter into it
3. Enable GitHub Pages:
   • Repo → Settings → Pages
   • Source: Deploy from a branch → main / (root)
4. Open build_absentee_json.py and set REPO_ROOT to the local path where you cloned the repo, e.g.:

   REPO_ROOT = r"C:\Users\YourName\Documents\GitHub\va-absentee"
   

5. Install dependencies if needed:

   py -3.12 -m pip install pandas pyodbc
   

Refreshing the data

Each morning (or whenever you want to update):

1. Run the Python script:

   py -3.12 build_absentee_json.py
   

2. Open GitHub Desktop
3. Commit the changed data/*.json files
4. Push to origin

The live dashboard at https://brennertobe07.github.io/va-absentee/ will update within ~1 minute.

Dashboard features

• Statewide view — summary cards + D/R/U returned vs. still-out charts
• County selector — click any county in the sidebar to filter all charts and the precinct table to that county
• County search — type to filter the sidebar list
• Precinct table — shows all precincts for the selected county; searchable
• Total rows — pinned at the top of every table

Notes

• GitHub Pages sites are publicly accessible. The data published here is aggregated totals only (no individual voter records).
• The dashboard reads JSON from data/ using relative paths — it works correctly whether viewed on GitHub Pages or opened locally as a file.