Shaping Voter Data

[Noble]

I'm learning Power BI and wanted to experiment by exploring local voter data.  Every time they have a new election, they add another Field to the data.

The fields represent the election type (General, Primary, Special) and there are two Absentee fields - one has a value if they voted absentee in a particular election, the other has how they voted absentee (By mail, in person, etc.).  Each of these fields includes the date of the election, for example 112018 for November 2018 or 052019 for May 2019.

What's the best way to Shape this sort of data?  While I understand what they mean when looking at it, it seems really hard to report on in this form.

A few things I can imagine doing is making a chart showing how often people vote by area.  Party affiliation by age or location, etc.  The kind of stuff you usually have to find in a news story or something.

The file with Absentee info is rather large, but here's a small file (public information) showing how the General/Primary/Special election info is arranged.

http://boelcd.franklincountyohio.gov/assets/components/ftp.cfc?method=getOverSFTP&LocalPathName=F%3A...

[v-juanli-msft]

Hi @Noble 

In your example,

Columns from "STATE ID" to "ROAD", show the personal information of voters,

Then columns from "052019-P" to "032000-P" show the election type and date of each voter,

"Every time they have a new election, they add another Field to the data"

-> This means a new column like "052020-P" would add to the dataset,

Is my understanding correct?

"there are two Absentee fields"

->"052019-P", here "P" means Primary, but which character to identity for absentee type (By mail, in person, etc.)?

Best Regards
Maggie