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jnoss/forbes_fec_downloader.md

Last active June 24, 2017 20:58
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Forbes FEC downloader
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forbes_fec_downloader.md

to use Forbes FEC downloader

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonbruner/2011/02/03/how-to-build-your-own-political-contribution-database

MySQL-python

The MySQLdb their code is looking for is pip installable, name is MySQL-python

patch for new data format

FEC ftp site has a new format since the article was written in 2011, with files in folders for each year; to accomodate this: in downloadAll.py replace line 41 (the one with the urlstr = "ftp..." with these 2 lines:

        longyr = '20'+yr
        urlstr = "ftp://ftp.fec.gov/FEC/%s/%s%s.zip" % (longyr,fileType,yr)

credentials

Need to be updated in several files, where they have conn = MySQLdb.connect(... need to enter in the password you set for your local mysql user

...

Looks like the data format the FEC provides is different now than it was when this article was written, so this will take some re-writing to fix.

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