Introduction
Since Vote Smart's inception in 1988, we have been striving to improve our processes to become more efficient and accurate. Automation is a natural progression to this goal. Automation can help with both our efficiency and accuracy by significantly reducing time spent on research and entry, as well as significantly reducing human error and improving our checking processes. With that in mind, the Research and PCT Departments have begun to implement process that will help get and clean data, as well as reduce entry time.Current Tools/Resources
Firefox Update ScannerScraping
Current Projects
Scanning of SIG webpages using the Firefox ScannerScraping and Bulk Import (through a new module) of SIG ratings scorecards and a few "clean" endorsements (i.e., in a format easily scraped or copy-pasted)
Scraping of candidate lists for PCT QC
Potential Projects
Creating our own scanner and implementing it across multiple departments and sub-departmentsScraping and bulk entry of Thomas (Congressional Record) into Admin for editing using a new module; could possibly do this for other low scale projects like Senator websites (100 Sen.'s) and Committee Websites
Complete more regular roster checks using the Firefox Scanner or our own scanner + developing a script that automatically compares our rosters to rosters from the primary source and make changes automatically w/ human checks; this could apply to candidate lists as well
Vote Easy: automated research to cut down on research time as well as pull more data for display on Vote Easy (currently we only need a few pieces of evidence and "take what we can get," however, a more automated approach would allow us to display additional evidence from more data types
Interaction with campaign finance API's (Follow the Money)
