Richmond Sunlight feature: Voting records as CSV.

I’ve added a small but useful new feature to Richmond Sunlight: fully exportable voting data. In the sidebar of every legislator’s page you’ll find a link to download CSV (Excel) data that catalogs all of their votes, on the floor and in committee. I figured this might be useful, what with the campaigns underway. Whether you want Sen. Jeannemarie Devolites Davis’ voting record or Del. Watkins Abbitt’s, Del. David Poisson or Del. Paula Miller, it’s all there.

Published by Waldo Jaquith

Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Char­lottes­­ville, VA, USA. more »

14 replies on “Richmond Sunlight feature: Voting records as CSV.”

  1. There’s no such thing as a print-friendly CSV file, nor is there such a thing as links within a CSV file. CSV (comma-separated values) is just a list of data, like such:

    HB616,”Sentencing proceeding; victim impact testimony is to be admitted during jury hearing.”,Y,pass,””,2006-01-27

    It’s not possible to embed a link, and there’s no printer formatting — it’s just straight up data.

  2. Thank you for your service Waldo! I now know that not only did delegate Chris Saxman support these infamous “abuser fees”, but that he never met an abuser fee he couldn’t vote in support of. Waterboy to Grover Norquist!

  3. Richmond Sunlight just got a nice plug on the Kojo Nnamdi show (WAMU), in response to a question from a listener on how she could find out who voted in favor of the abuser fees . . .

  4. Hmm. For some odd reason, I can’t view those CSV files with CSView or MS Excel Viewer. Any other suggestions?

    That is strange — thanks for mentioning it. The data is fine, but Windows can be enormously finicky about file types. Windows may not be smart enough to see a filename that ends in “.csv” and figure out hey, this data is probably comma separated values (CSV). I’ll fire up Windows XP in Parallels and see if I can figure out what’s wrong, and then see what I can change about how the file is transfered that might give some stronger hints to Windows that .csv really, truly does mean CSV.

  5. Richmond Sunlight just got a nice plug on the Kojo Nnamdi show (WAMU), in response to a question from a listener on how she could find out who voted in favor of the abuser fees . . .

    Since you mentioned that, I’ve been listening to today’s episode. Sean O’Brien got the plug in for the site there. That’s pretty cool. :)

    For some odd reason, I can’t view those CSV files with CSView or MS Excel Viewer. Any other suggestions?

    I just fired up a fresh copy of Windows XP and downloaded CSView and MS Excel Viewer. CSView crashes as soon as I run it, so I can’t say what’s up with that not working. MS Excel Viewer won’t view CSV files because that program is intended only to view Excel files — that is, files that use Microsoft’s binary data storage format, rather than the simple, plain-text CSV format.

    So, in short, I have nothing useful to offer you. :) Here’s hoping that the problem is not more widespread — MB’s comment gives me some hope on that front.

  6. I haven’t tried it at work (Linux here at home), but might it be a line-ending issue?

    My work computer recognized .csv files out of the box.

  7. Everything that I’ve read indicates that a \n is what should appear at the end of a line in CSV, rather than an \r or a \n\r, which is how this CSV is being exported now. But what I’ve read is really unimpressive and unconvincing. Since I can’t reproduce the problem, I’m not getting real far. :)

  8. Heh, that sounds like it’s not a line ending issue then. Honestly, line-endings are pretty much always my first guess when a file works on one platform, but not another.

    But yeah, I just checked the csv writer that I wrote, and it uses \n. Not having CSView, I can’t say whether or not it would read my files.

    Good luck on getting these to cooperate.

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