MECraker is a set of python tools for collecting campaign finance data from the Missouri Ethics Commision website.
As a program, MECraker can compile donation and expense records and place the records in a spreadsheet for further analysis.
As a library, MECraker can be used to easily parse documents filed with the MEC.
- Python 3
- MuPDF
- requests
- PyMuPDF
To use as a program:
python3 -m mec run
MECraker will guide you through how to download the documents. By default, MECraker will watch your Downloads/ folder for any recently downloaded documents. It will process these documents, cache them in reports/ and store the data as .csv files in csvs/.
To generate reference documents:
python3 -m mec ref {seqno,fields}
This will generate a reference pdf in the current directory. The seqno reference document is useful for creating templates in the templates/ directory. The fields reference document is useful for confirming the template. It shows the which area of a page data will be collected for a given variable.