About Our Services

VoterPunch gathers and aggregates data about the congressional record. Specifically, we aggregate govtrack.us data with our own vote descriptions and analytics. The combined data is then made available to you via the website and our data services.

Our data is syndicated using Atom feeds that contain specific subsets of our data. For example, if you wanted information about a specific roll call, you'd formulate URL like:

http://voterpunch.org/services/rollcall/110/h/senate/y/2008/r/215/

This would give you the roll call information from the 110 congressional session for the roll 215 in the year 2008 for the senate combined with our vote descriptions and analytics.

The data is represented as an Atom feed. Some information is represented as categorizations in the feed using the atom:category element. Others are XML data islands in the entries of the feed.

Our services require an API key that must be obtained by contacting voterpunch at admin@voterpunch.org

How We Use Govtrack.us

Govtrack.us provides data about the Congressional Record in a uniform XML format. While we use this data, we do not pull it directly. Instead, we use their software to generate our own XML data. We then run the data through our own quality assurance process and then import the data into our database. As the congressional record changes almost everyday, we do this nightly.

Where possible, we preserve the XML format provided by govtrack.us. Specifically, we use their roll call format and member identifiers.