washtenaw-elections-scraper

This is a tool to retrieve election results data from Washtenaw County. The results can be found here.

We've used this for the 2021 Ann Arbor special elections, the 2022 midterm primary elections and the 2022 midterm general elections.

Previously, this scraper was configured to run through GitHub Actions. It is now configured to run as an AWS Lambda function.

Local development

You'll need a Python version >= 3.9 for zoneinfo.

1. Create a virtual environment by running python -m venv venv.
2. Activate your virtual environment by running source venv/bin/activate.
3. Install dependencies by running pip install -r requirements.txt.
4. Run the scraper with ENVIRONMENT=local python main.py.

Production notes

• Use Python 3.9 as the runtime and x86_64 as the architecture.
• Use an execution role with access to S3.
• Add an EventBridge (CloudWatch Events) trigger with a schedule expression.
• Add the following environment variables to your Lambda configuration:

  ENVIRONMENT=production
  BUCKET=subdomain.domain.com
  KEY=directory/filename
  

• Upload lambda_handler.py to the code section.
• You may need to change the timeout in general configurations.
• You may need to add layers for external packages.