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Elections scraping

Let's use an LLM to create a scraper for the Massachusetts state electios website.

Setup

Set up your project environment

  1. First, clone this repo
  2. Set up your python virtual environment
    1. Just in case your virtual environemnt from yesterday is still active, run deactivate. If doing so gives you an error, don't worry!
    2. Create a new Python virtual environment: 
      python3 -m venv scrape_env
    3. Activate the new virtual environment: 
      source ./scrape_env/bin/activate
    4. Install the lxml, requests, and BeautifulSoup python libraries: 
      pip install lxml requests beautifulsoup4

Task instructions

  1. Visit the website: https://electionstats.state.ma.us/elections/search/year_from:2025/year_to:2025

  2. Check robots.txt file (visit https://electionstats.state.ma.us/robots.txt). What preferences does this site express about whether they want to be scraped or not?

  3. Inspect the page to identify the table where election data is stored: a. Right-click anywhere on the page > Click "Inspect" > find the table with election data

  4. Read the IMDB scraper example to scrape the elections website and discuss what each line does with your teammate.

  5. Make a new scraper in election-scraper.py that scrapes information from the MA state gov website. Complete the following tasks by copy/paste and modifying lines from the IMDB scraper code one-by-one.

    a. Task 1: grab each row of the table (What is the CSS Selector for this?) b. Task 2: extract the year and print it out b. Task 3: extract the name of the candidate and print it out c. Task 4: extract the name of the party and print it out

  6. Ask the LLM to help you write the code to save the data to a CSV file.

  7. Adjust your scraper to only grab 2024 elections. Hint: try manually adjusting the the year filters on the elections website. Does the URL change?

  8. Bonus: Extract additional data fields!