XML Specification

Getting Started

The actual election information specifies collections of elements, some containing links between each other. The entire set of tags must be encapsulated in a root object named VipObject. See the sample xml file and xsd file for more details.

Each top-level tag is a container for other fields, described in their own section. The only required top-level tags are the source object and the election object, each of which must be present exactly once. All other top-level tags can be repeated an unlimited number of times, or not included at all; order of top-level tags does not matter. Each top-level tag is required to have a single attribute, “id”, which is required to be unique in a data file. The id attribute for the state object should be the state’s FIPS number and this is strongly recommended. The id attributes are not required to remain constant for the same piece of semantic data across multiple productions of the feed (e.g. candidate Michael Smith, running for dogcatcher in Iowa, is not required to have the same candidate id attribute each time the state of Iowa publishes data).

In general, subtag data can appear a maximum of one time within each top-level tag object and in any order. Exceptions are noted below.

For the data itself, the special characters &, <, and > need to be encoded as &amp;, &lt;, and &gt;, respectively.