ZA Election Status Bot

Periodic election status updates sent to a Slack channel, powered by News24 and Firebase.

Data Source

This project uses news24 to get the latests election results in JSON format.

We use https://www.news24.com/Elections/Ajax/ElectionResultsData/GetLiveUpdate?language=en&year=2019&electionType=National and get

{
  "LastUpdated": "Sat, 11 May 13:54",
  "LastUpdatedTicks": "636931796400000000",
  "Results": [
    {
      "Key": "EC",
      "Value": {
        "HasVotes": true,
        "Party1": {
          "Color": "#54a954",
          "Logo": "https://www.news24.com/Elections/PartyLogo.axd?v=8&id=ANC",
          "Name": "ANC",
          "Percentage": "69.26",
          "Votes": 1399455,
          "VotesDisplay": "1  399 455"
        },
        "Party2": {
          "Color": "#0159a0",
          "Logo": "https://www.news24.com/Elections/PartyLogo.axd?v=8&id=DA",
          "Name": "DA",
          "Percentage": "15.01",
          "Votes": 303309,
          "VotesDisplay": " 303 309"
        },
        "VotePercentageDifference": "15.73"
      }
    },
    {
      "Key": "WC"
      // ...snip...
    },
    // ...snip...
    {
      "Key": "SA"
      // ...snip...
    }
  ]
}

Posting to Slack

This project uses Incoming Webhooks to post to slack, see their documentation for more information.

Scheduling Executions

Firebase functions are used to check for and posts results every 10 minutes, for more information see the Scheduling Cloud Functions for Firebase (cron) blog post.

Deploy

To deploy, first set up a firebase project on the blaze plan and then inside the functions folder run

npm install
npm run build
npm run deploy