RE: Fw: [election-services] Voting Information Project

[richcar@us.ibm.com]

Making contact with the VIP people sounds like the right thing to do.  On the technical side, the VIP 1.2 schema does not take advantage of various XML capabilities, like the ability to enforce uniqueness of ids or to enforce cardinality constraints on some elements.  

I noticed the following entry on the VIP FAQ page, the logic of which I don't quite understand:

5) What about the Election Markup Language (EML)? Why aren't you using that?

The Election Markup Language (EML) is a data standard that covers most of what the VIP's format covers and more. While it's very flexible, and is global, it has seen little adoption in the United States. To spur state election officials to publish their data in a common format, we designed a more focused format that is easier for states and U.S. organizations to adopt. During this process, we looked to the EML for inspiration and we plan on exporting VIP data into EML in the near future.