Draining Swamp

Purpose

We wanted to create a tool that consolidates information about politicians and organizations that lobby those candidates so that it is easy to see what motivates a politician's decision on whether they vote "yay" or "nay" on a bill. All of this information is public on various websites such as OpenSecrets and LegiScan, but it is scattered. We believe that it should be clear where politicians are being lobbied from, which is why we created Draining Swamp.

We learned a lot about pulling data from API's, how to parse through large sets of data to get what we needed efficiently, and a lot of tricks about HTML.

We built our entire project on a Python codebase because Python is capable of quickly parsing through large .json files. We read and wrote files with thousands of lines of text and needed a lightweight coding language that could go into a file or read data from a URL and extract specific information without any hassle.

Some of the challenges we faced were trying to interface multiple dictionaries and other data structures. We had to generate a lot of API keys to pull the necessary amount of data for our project. There are a lot of politicians and quite a number of organizations that OpenSecret keeps track of!

Although our webpage is fairly bare-bones we put a lot of work into this project and are looking to continue working on it in the future.