1

The ECI website has this data.

2

The ECI website has this data.

3

… and, most of the data is in PDFs

4

The PDF files have a reasonably clear structure

5

… that translates into text that can be parsed

6

… which, with some effort, can be converted into a structured format

… and at this point, we need to start checking for errors.

7

At this point, we start checking what’s gone wrong

Each row here is one constituency.

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The number of candidates that have contested in each constituency in every year is shown as a table.

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You can see that some patterns emerge here.

8

Not every spelling error is easily identifiable by the first letter

9

Fortunately, large scale data itself can provide a solution

10

… with modern tools that support machine learning