A vote event is an event at which people’s votes are recorded.

1. Use cases & requirements

The Vote Event class should have properties for:

  1. the organization whose members are voting

    House of Commons

  2. the legislative session in which the vote event occurs

    2nd Session of the 41st Parliament

  3. identifiers

    Vote No. 42

  4. the motion on which people are voting

    That the House do now proceed to the Orders of the Day.

  5. the time at which the event begins

    January 1, 2013 at 12:30pm

  6. the time at which the event ends

    January 1, 2013 at 12:45pm

  7. the result of the vote event

    The ayes have it.

  8. the result of the vote event within groups of voters

    Within the Legislative Council of Hong Kong, the motion was passed by the functional constituencies but negatived by the geographical constituencies.

  9. the vote totals

    Yeas: 128, Nays: 145

  10. the individual votes

    John Doe cast a vote in favor of the motion.

2. Standard reuse

Few specifications exist for vote events, and few legislatures publish vote data in a machine-readable format. Dublin Core, Schema.org, and Parliamentary Metadata Language terms are retained from the inventory of terms.

3. Classes and properties

Term Mapping Definition
Vote event opengov:VoteEvent An event at which people's votes are recorded
organization schema:organizer The organization whose members are voting1
legislative session schema:superEvent The legislative session in which the vote event occurs1
identifier dcterms:identifier An issued identifier, e.g. a sequential number
motion opengov:motion The motion being decided
classification ncal:categories The vote event's category
start date schema:startDate The time at which the event begins
end date schema:endDate The time at which the event ends
result opengov:result The result of the vote event2
group result opengov:groupResult The result of the vote event within groups of voters
count opengov:count The number of votes for an option
vote opengov:vote A voter's vote

The VoteEvent class is a subclass of the Event class.

The vote totals should agree with the individual votes. The vote totals may not include all options from individual votes, and the individual votes may not include all present voters, in particular if the options chosen that have no effect on the result, e.g. abstentions.

1. If an implementation uses the Motion class, it is not necessary to repeat the organization and legislative_session properties on the motion's vote events, unless they differ; for example, a committee may consider a legislature's motion, such as in the Riksdag.

2. If a motion has multiple vote events, it is relevant to communicate the result of each event.

4. Serialization

JSON differences from other RDF serializations:

  • The term organization is used instead of organizer, to be consistent with the Membership class.
  • The term legislative_session is used instead of superEvent, for clarity.

5. Code lists

Result

Implementations may use values from outside this list.

  • pass
  • fail