A.6. Vote Smart

Project Vote Smart is a data source for political data from the United States of America; see http://www.votesmart.org/. They provide a REST API to retrieve their data. Sunlight Labs has written a well-documented Python interface for this API. If you want to use the API, you first need to get an API key, which you can obtain from here: http://votesmart.org/services_api.php.

You can download the Python interface here: https://github.com/sunlightlabs/python-votesmart. On the left side is a download button labeled ZIP. Click that and download the most recent version. Once you’ve downloaded that file, change your directory to the downloaded and unzipped file folder. Then enter the following command: