#ELEX-MICRO Everything you like about Elex, only less.

What?

Elex-micro is a Python library for returning results, and only results, from the AP Election v2.0 API. It is related to, but conceptually distinct from, Elex, a more fully-featured wrapper.

Why?

At The New York Times, we need our results just a little bit faster. And by "a little bit" I mean "about twice as fast."

time elex results 2012-11-02 -d '/Users/jbowers/Desktop/general/20121106-national.json' > /tmp/test.csv

2016-08-19 11:58:29,120 (INFO) elex (v2.0.9) : Getting results for election 2012-11-06

real    0m10.245s
user    0m9.457s
sys     0m0.592s

time results -d ~/Desktop/general/20121106-national.json --csv > /tmp/test.csv

real    0m5.834s
user    0m5.255s
sys     0m0.515s

How?

Elex-micro passes all of the same tests that Elex does; the test suite is actually ported over from Elex. The output that Elex-micro generates is identical to Elex for results data. However, it is not a perfect drop-in replacement for Elex.

Things Elex-micro does not do that Elex does

• Hit the API directly (we use curl --compressed and point Elex-micro to a local file)
• Snapshot files to a local folder or to MongoDB (we do with with curl)
• Return any other Elections objects except CandidateReportingUnit (we use Elex for initialization)
• Have a pluggable CLI architecture (we only need JSON and CSV)