I volunteered to provide technical assitance to an election campaign in Bangalore (and also in Andhra Pradesh).

• A campaign management system
• volunteer signup system
• webapp to find voter details by voterid
• script to format voter lists of a polling center as PDF in compact form
• and other small little tools

• Paliamentary Constituency (PC25 - Bangalore North)
• Assembly Constituency (AC158 - Hebbal)
• Ward (W046 - Jayachamarajendra Nagar)
• Polling Center
  • Typically a school/govt building containing one or more polling booths
  • E.g. PX065 - Adarsha Vidya Mandira, R T Nagara
• Polling Booth
  • E.g. PB0203 - Adarsha Vidya Mandira, Room No-1
  • Typically have about 1000 voters
• VoterID
  • unique (supposed to be) identifier for a voter

• Beautiful Soup is your friend
• Always save intermediate results
• ASP.net is the worth thing ever happened to web

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import urllib2

def parse(html):
    soup = BeautifulSoup(html)

    # find all tds in a table
    rows = soup.select("#ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_GridView1 tr")

    # extract text for all rows except the header row
    for tr in rows[1:]:
        tds = tr.find_all("td")
        yield [td.get_text() for td in tr.find_all("td")]

URL = ("http://ceokarnataka.kar.nic.in/ElectionFinalroll2014/" + 
       "Part_List.aspx?ACNO=158")

html = urllib2.urlopen(URL).read()
data = parse(html)

@cache.disk_memoize("cache/wp.html")
def get_wp_page():
    return urllib2.urlopen(WP_URL).read()

@cache.disk_memoize("cache/table_{0}.json")
def get_table_for_state(state):
    ...

@cache.disk_memoize("cache/{state_name}_pc.tsv")
def get_pc_list(state_name):
    return [['PC{0:02d}'.format(int(row[0])), row[1].strip()] 
            for row in get_table_for_state(state_name)]

@cache.disk_memoize("cache/MP/districts.json")
def get_districts(self):
    ...

@cache.disk_memoize("cache/MP/AC{ac:03d}_booths.tsv")
def get_booths_of_ac(self, dist, ac):
    ...

@cache.disk_memoize("cache/map/{1[state]}/district_{1[district]}_acs.json")
def get_district_acs(self, district):
    ...

@cache.disk_memoize("cache/MP/districts.json")
def get_districts(self):
    return self.browser.get_select_options("ddlDistrict")

@cache.disk_memoize("cache/MP/AC{ac:03d}_booths.tsv")
def get_booths_of_ac(self, dist, ac):
    self.browser.select_option('ddlDistrict', dist)
    self.browser.select_option('ddlAssembly', ac)
    soup = self.browser.get_soup()
    ...

Thanks to Open Bangalore and DataMeet group for map boundaries.

• ReportLab works fine.
• Beware of performance issues.

I continued to mess with more government data and improve the system.

• https://github.com/anandology/opendata-ge2014
• https://github.com/anandology/voternet
• https://github.com/anandology/cleansweep
• https://github.com/anandology/india-geosearch
• https://github.com/anandology/voterdb

Interested to collaborate?

• Messing with government data is challenging and fun
• BeautifulSoup is good enough for parsing HTML (even ASP.net websites!)
• Saving intermediate results saves you lot of time
• Parsing PDFs is a bit tough, but not impossible
• All this data will be very valuable when made available openly