aubreynngomah-bit/zambia-election-live-app

# Zambia Election Live — ECZ Results Dashboard A small Flask application that fetches the **official Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ) results portal** and presents a mobile-friendly presidential results dashboard. ## Official source results.elections.org.zm The app intentionally does **not** generate projections, estimates, rumours or unofficial results. ## Update design - Server fetches the ECZ portal every 30 minutes. - Browser polls this app every 60 seconds. - This means the ECZ server is not hit every minute. - If the ECZ source cannot be fetched, the app displays the last known state/error rather than inventing numbers. ## Run locally ```bash python -m venv .venv # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate # Linux/macOS: source .venv/bin/activate pip install -r requirements.txt python app.py ``` Open localhost ## Production Use a WSGI server such as Gunicorn, with the included config: ```bash gunicorn app:app --config gunicorn.conf.py ``` `gunicorn.conf.py` starts the background fetch scheduler from a `post_fork` hook so it only runs inside the worker process that actually serves requests (gunicorn's master process also imports the app to validate it, which would otherwise start a second, unused scheduler there). Set `FETCH_MINUTES=30` if you want to make the interval explicit. Deploying to Render: push this repo and use `render.yaml` (Blueprint deploy) or set the start command above manually. ## Important The ECZ portal is the authoritative source. Its HTML structure can change. If ECZ changes its page markup, update `fetch_results()` in `app.py` so that the parser matches the new official structure. For a high-stakes public deployment, add: - persistent database snapshots, - source timestamps, - an audit log, - checksum/hash of fetched source data, - retry/backoff, - monitoring, - HTTPS, - rate-limit protection, - and an explicit disclaimer that the app is an independent presentation layer and not ECZ.