Sacramento campaign finance

Pull data from the City and County's campaign finance websites and display the total raised along with all of the donors per candidate in each race.

Getting started

This project relies on Node and the associated package manager, npm. We recommend using nvm to get the proper version of Node set up on your machine.

Once you have nvm installed, change into the project directory and run nvm use. That should activate the proper version of Node for the project.

Next, install the dependencies needed with npm install. This might take a few minutes.

You can now run two different commands, depending on what you'd like to do. If you want to run the web app for development use npm run dev. By default, the application runs at http://127.0.0.1:3000/.

The application is built using SvelteKit. If you're unfamiliar with the syntax or project structure we recommend you go through the "Getting Started" and "Core Concepts" sections in the SvelteKit documentation.

Data generation

You'll need Node installed if you'd like to run the scraper. Once you're ready to go, run the command node scripts/index.js.

Scraper methodology

Runs from scripts/index.js, which calls out to the other files in scripts/. It:

1. downloads a single year, usually the current year, from the two portals as a ZIP archive (download.js)
2. unzips the downloaded file into an Excel file (extract.js)
3. convert that Excel file into a series of .json files within data/ (transform.js) - the files are stored here so that we only have to download a single year's worth of data to update
4. loads all the data in-memory so we can do some subsequent aggregation (loads.js)
5. create $lib/data.json by filtering the data for any of the committees that show up in the config.js file (both candidates and elected officials)