VoterFocus scraper

A python library to fetch campaign contribution data from government entities that use VoterFocus, an election management tool from VR Systems, Inc.

Here's an example: https://www.voterfocus.com/CampaignFinance/candidate_pr.php?c=palmbeach

Usage

To get all candidates in an election

Election objects contain all of the candidates on the election webpage

from voterfocus import Election

scraper = Election(county="palmbeach")
print(scraper.candidates)

This returns contribution totals for all candidates in each race in Palm Beach County as a JSON object.

[    
    {
        "id": "333",
        "county": "palmbeach",
        "office": "Sheriff",
        "name": "Ric Bradshaw",
        "party": "DEM",
        "file_status": "Active-Filed",
        "monetary_contributions": 555805,
        "in-kind_contributions": 4042,
        "expenses": 34034.96
    },
    ... 
]

To download all campaign finance data for an election

This will download a spreadsheet of contributions and expenses in a separate file for each candidate in a data/ directory.

from voterfocus import Election

scraper = Election(county="palmbeach")
scraper.get_all_cash()

To scrape an election other than the default

Some VoterFocus county websites may default to previous elections, or you may want to scrape from a different election for another reason. But the scraper allows specifying an election by passing in an election_id that corresponds to VoterFocus's internal ID for an election.

Where to get the election ID The election ID can be found in the url's el= parameter. For example: https://www.voterfocus.com/CampaignFinance/candidate_pr.php?el=144&c=broward shows the elction ID for the 2020 general election is 144.

To use this in the scraper:

from voterfocus import Election

scraper = Election(county="broward", election_id="144")
scraper.download_summaries()