Reveal Reporting Network Training: Structured Legislative Data with LegiScan

This is a product of the Reveal Reporting Network, which supports small or local newsrooms with free investigative resources. Learn more at revealnews.org/network and review our partner requirements here.

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📄: Big Lie Proponents Are Creating Harsh Criminal Penalties for Elections Activity

🎧: The Ballot Boogeymen

📊: Search for the Crime Bills That Target Voting and Elections in Your State

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This repository contains Python scripts that interface with the LegiScan API to retrieve, collate and analyze structured data on legislation at both the federal and state level.

You'll be able to examine the history of a specific bill, analyze legislative action on a specific issue over a decade’s time¹ or simply create an organized system for tracking the next session.

Requirements

Python

• Version 3.8 or later

Packages

See Installation

Legiscan

• An account (free)

  

• An API key (only possible once you've verified the email address under which you registered)

Setup

Virtual Environment

• I've only used pyenv for the last few years, but you should be able to use conda, etc. if that's what you're comfortable with!

  pyenv

  pyenv virtualenv 3.10.4 great_virtualenv_name
  

Installation

pip install -r requirements.txt

Contributors

• @meli-lewis

Contact

If you want to contact me you can reach me at the email address listed in my profile, or through one of the methods on my Reveal staff page.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which is -- as of 2022 -- specified by the LegiScan API.

Footnotes

1. See https://legiscan.com/legiscan-states for jurisdiction-specific availability. ↩