R function to find top vote-getter in a csv or Excel election results file. Requires rio package, and results file with candidate results in adjoining columns. findwinner function arguments: filename (string), datacolstart (number of data column where results data starts; 2 for column B in Excel, for example), datacolstop (number of the last dat…

findwinner.R

function (filename, datacolstart, datacolstop, exportcsv = TRUE) 
{
  if (!require("rio")) 
    install.packages("rio")
  data <- rio::import(filename)
  for(i in 1:nrow(data)){
    ranks <- rank(data[i,2:7])
    maxrank <- as.numeric(max(ranks))
    winners <- names(ranks[ranks==maxrank])
    data$Winners[i] <- paste(winners, collapse = ", ")
  }

  if (exportcsv) {
    filename_root <- strsplit(filename, "\\.")[[1]][1]
    filename_with_winner <- paste0(filename_root, "_winners.csv")
    rio::export(data, filename_with_winner)
  }
  return(data)
}