Inconsistencies in 2016 parties

[pullyl]

Notice some counties have REP / DEM while others have Republican / Democrat. Should we standardize to REP / DEM? Just want to understand what the best standard is before going through that.

[dwillis]

Our process is to convert what's in the original file for files in the -data- repos, but there's no harm in standardizing on abbreviations at this point, so if you'd like to do that, that would be welcome.

[pullyl]

Got it, that makes sense @dwillis. I'm doing some analysis on top of all of this amazing data, and I'm finding a need to standardize a number of things in the data (e.g., party, names, etc.) as well as add things in that are missing (e.g., some counties don't have party for folks). Whats the best way for me to do that while maintaining the integrity of the data? I'm happy to contribute those things back, but also happy to fork (with so much credit of course) and maintain a parallel repo so that we don't lose the CSV translation of the raw data. I see merits in both approaches, and happy to go either way.

[dwillis]

We'd be happy to accept standardizations for names and parties (and the addition of parties where they are missing) as pull requests, thanks @pullyl!