ELC (Evaluating Local Candidates)

Inspiration

The inspiration for this app is the upcoming elections. With so much information that is blasted to the average voter these days, it can be difficult to sift through the noise to find the facts that matter. Our app presents the facts as they are, with the actual voting records for candidates that have been in office, in addition to much more information about the candidates a voter has to choose from for their location.

What it does

Our app queries information about candidates for races, as well as any additional legislation or referendums that the user is eligible to cast their vote. It queries this information using the ProPublica Congress API, Google Civics API, as well as information scraped from Votesmart.org. This information would then displayed on an Android phone through our app.

How we built it

We built our app by implementing a C++ program which used the Google Civic API and the ProPublica Congress API. Using this API, the C++ program creates several JSON files which are then passed on to our web scraping program that was created in Node.js. This web scraper then uses this data to scrape from the Votesmart.org site, and find additional information about the candidates specified and creates an additional JSON file. If we had had more time, we would have been able to implement the connections between our front and back end, where this JSON file would be parsed and displayed on the Android phone.

Challenges we ran into

Finding the vote data proved more difficult than expected.

Scraping the Votesmart.org website.

Calling data from Google and ProPublica APIs.

Finding tools for building a GUI.

Building a C++ GUI.

Building an Android GUI.

Linking our front end to the back end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Scraping the Votesmart.org website.

Calling data from Google and ProPublica APIs.

What we learned

How to access an API.

How to access, modify, and save JSON files.

How to scrape a website.

How to build an Android GUI.

How to build a Windows GUI.

What's next for ELC (Evaluating Local Candidates)

Linking the front end to the back end, so that the data can be displayed to the end user

Find more data regarding to candidates voting records

Create a finished app

Improve the design and aesthetic of the Android GUI

Troubleshooting web scraper for possible issues/inconsistencies

Built With

Submitted to

DubHacks 2018

Created by

I worked on both the front end with qt for use with our c++ back end, as well as working on our back end with c++.
Some of the other efforts were expended in looking into implementing a SQL database into our app, as well as looking into platforms for building our front end.

Josh Wassing
I worked on the back end, pulling data from the Google Civic API and ProPublica API. I queried the APIs to pull that data with cURL. I created and manipulated JSON files to send to the driver program.

Bobby Thompson
I built the javascript to perform the web scraping that got us our data on local candidates that was not contained on Propublica. I was also a part of the planning and designing of our overall project.

Eric Engel
I worked on the front end of designing the app through qt with c++ before switching android-studio for a better looking prototype for our project. I learned alot about qt with being able to push and pull data from the application. Along with linking signals and slots together.

Roper Roper
I worked on the front end using android studio. It was little frustrating at first, since I've never used it before, before once I got the hang of it, I hit the ground running. Now, our team has a great app that I feel as though I've made a huge contribution to.

Zeak

Updates

Josh Wassing started this project — Oct 21, 2018 02:38 PM EDT

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