Request Page from SSA for Names By State with Python 3 and urllib.

ssa_names_by_state.py

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import urllib.request
import urllib.parse

url = 'http://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/namesbystate.cgi'

post_data = {
  'state': 'IL',
  'year': '2012'
}

post_encode = urllib.parse.urlencode(post_data)
post_encode = post_encode.encode('UTF-8')

request = urllib.request.Request(url, post_encode)
response = urllib.request.urlopen(request).read().decode('UTF-8', 'ignore')

# HTML Data now in Response
print(response)