Congressional Vote Database
December 5th, 2005 | Published in Fed Data, Online | 2 Comments
So humor me today, and the CAR stories will return tomorrow. I’d like to announce a project that Adrian Holovaty of washingtonpost.com and I started working on a few months ago: the Post’s congressional votes database. The first of many, many Post web apps built using Django, this site is a browsable archive of votes in the House and Senate since 1991. It has plenty of features, including vote breakdowns (try “by astrological sign”) and RSS feeds for each member, so you can be notified when a vote has been posted. Adrian did the heavy lifting, but as a normal person he doesn’t have my intimate knowledge of Congress (thanks, CQ!). So it worked out well, I think. The site is powered by Python, PostgreSQL and Django.
December 5th, 2005 at 7:58 pm (#)
Congressional Vote Database
Another great piece of journalism by software development on Washingtonpost.com (via The Scoop)….
July 11th, 2006 at 2:05 pm (#)
Over the past few months, washingtonpost.com has added new features to our politics section making the coverage more useful and providing more information on elected officials and candidates.
The Congressional Votes Database, in addition to individual voting records, now offers official biographies for each individual and a link to a PDF version of each member’s annual financial disclosure statement.
Links to recent Washington Post and washingtonpost.com articles on individual lawmakers have also been added. The first reference of a lawmaker’s name in an article will link to his or her respective entry in the database.
If a member of Congress is currently involved in a competitive election, we provide a link to a “Key Raceâ€? profile page. Readers who want to stay up to date on Key Race analysis may subscribe to a Key Races RSS feed. In addition to information on senators and representatives, we’ve added a full demographic profile for each lawmaker’s state or district.
For readers interested in the most important congressional votes, reporters and editors at The Washington Post and washingtonpost.com collaborated on a list of “Key Votes� cast during the 109th Congress. Each Key Vote includes an explanation of the legislation in question and analysis of its political impact. We have also created a daily schedule for both houses of Congress, including floor action and committee meetings and hearings.
Two new podcasts are available. The first is a weekly political roundtable discussion with Post staffers and invited newsmakers hosted by Sam Litzinger. The second is a twice-monthly program hosted by washingtonpost.com political writer and analyst Chris Cillizza, author of washingtonpost.com’s political blog, The Fix, that includes interviews with top 2008 presidential contenders and occasional analysis of how the 2008 race is shaping up.
Another addition is a “Top Stories” and “RSS & Podcasts” subscription box at the bottom of each article. The top stories feature allows readers to view the top 35 most-read politics articles in the section, while the RSS & Podcast provides links to our two politics podcasts as well as RSS feeds of our best articles, columns, and blogs.
Check out all the new features at the following link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/politics/?nav=left