voter-tools

Tools for online voter registration in the United States of America.

Contains a command-line tool (vote) and a python library (voter_tools) to:

1. Check voter registration status in key states, currently including:
   • Georgia
   • Michigan
   • Pennsylvania
   • Wisconsin
2. Perform online voter registration (OVR) directly with key states, via their APIs. We currently support the Pennsylvania OVR API with plans to support Michigan and Washington states in the future.

Installation

Install this library using pip:

pip install voter-tools

Command-line usage

Check registration of a single voter

To check whether a voter is registered:

vote check <first-name> <last-name> <zip> <dob YYYY-MM-DD> [--details]

This will tell you whether the user is registered to vote. You can request extra details (registration date, current status, etc.) with the --details flag. Not all states support all details.

Check registration of multiple voters in bulk

There is also a tool to check every record in a CSV file:

vote check-csv <input-file.csv> [--details]

A new CSV is written to stdout with the same fields as the input CSV plus extras related to the registration check.

Interact with the Pennsylvania API

The vote command contains a number of sub-commands for interacting directly with the Pennsylvania state API.

For instance, to invoke the API's "get available languages" call:

> vote pa get-languages
languages=(Language(code='LANGENG', name='English'), Language(code='LANGSPN', name='Spanish'), Language(code='LANGTCN', name='Chinese'))

Use vote pa --help for details on available subcommands.

Development

To contribute to this library, first checkout the code. Then create a new virtual environment:

cd voter-tools
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

Now install the dependencies and test dependencies:

pip install -e '.[dev]'

To run tests:

make test

To run a full lint/typecheck/test pass:

make check

State-specific documents

We've collected state-specific documents in the docs directory and will try to keep them up-to-date as state APIs change.