data needed for each House district and Senate seat

[mechanicalgirl]

1) primary and election dates if available

2) incumbent: name party affiliation url (if Democrat) Twitter handle (if Democrat) Facebook url (if Democrat)

3) any challenging candidates (if Democrat): name party affiliation url Twitter handle Facebook url

(can probably get incoming candidate data from fec.gov?)

[jesseharold]

This seems like a good source for the upcoming special elections (filling vacant congressional seats before regular elections happen): https://ballotpedia.org/Special_elections_to_the_115th_United_States_Congress_(2017-2018)

for the 2018 congressional elections, it looks like which seats are up for grabs aren't, as you said, all listed in one place, but since it's not info that will really change, would it be worthwhile to just go through these pages and grab the info manually? I'd be willing to put in the labor if you think that's a reasonable solution, and let me know what format of data is most useful: https://ballotpedia.org/United_States_Congress_elections,_2018

---

Here's an api that looks useful, if you don't already know about it https://www.govtrack.us/developers/api

info on every member of congress, including party affiliation and end date: https://www.govtrack.us/api/v2/role?current=true

info on their voting record can be found here as well: https://www.govtrack.us/api/v2/vote_voter/?person=400222&limit=10000&order_by=created&format=csv&fields=vote__id,created,option__value,vote__category,vote__chamber,vote__question,vote__number

[mechanicalgirl]

1) AAAAAH! I had no idea govtrack had an API. That's going to be super-useful.

2) I agree, inputting the 2018 data manually would probably be fine. In fact, that might be faster than writing scripts to automate it, it's such a small amount of data. If you're willing to do it, give me just a couple of days to get all this online. I've got a domain and host, I just need to take the time to load everything and get the DNS set up, but then I'll create a superuser account for you so that you can just go in and edit in the CMS. (I don't know if you've worked with Django before, but there's a CMS built in that makes it easy to make not-bulk edits.) I might even be able to do all this tomorrow, but I'll be at OSCON, so no guarantees.

Btw I wrote up a rough description of where I want to go with this project, it might make the data structure make a little more sense once you see it in the CMS: https://github.com/mechanicalgirl/progressive_voting/wiki

3) I'm going to look through those other sources tomorrow and write up a few more issues - I need to outline more specifically what data we need.

[jdunck]

I'm not sure of their ongoing commitment to the API, but if we're only concerned about near-term (special and 2018), then I think this API is also useful: https://developers.google.com/civic-information/

[jdunck]

I will read your Pages doc before commenting further. :)

[mechanicalgirl]

Hey all - I spent some time this morning writing up some more specific data requirements in separate issues, so I'm going to go ahead and close this ticket just to get it out of the list. But @jesseharold @jdunck I moved all these resources you suggested (plus a few I came across myself) into a wiki page (which I imagine we'll keep building on):

https://github.com/mechanicalgirl/progressive_voting/wiki/Data-Resources