Scrapes and parses campaign finance data from the Florida Secretary of State's website.
The Florida Secretary of State's campaign finance portal is somewhat of a nightmare to work with or glean anything meaningful from. This tool aims to make it easier to grab campaign finance data in bulk in a usable, machine-readable format rather than the fixed-width data normally returned when using the state's site.
The main script grabs results, cleans up the fields and then saves the data as CSV and JSON.
- Python 3
- PostgreSQL
- Some type of virtual environment recommended
Start up your virtual environment and run
pip install -r requirements.txt
or
pipenv install for pipenv users.
Run python flcampaigncash/main.py
By default, this grabs campaign contributions to candidates in the 2018 gubernatorial race. But the variables can be changed in the main script to specify different races or election years. That'll be more of a built out configuration feature eventually.