Open States strives to improve civic engagement at the state and federal level by providing data and tools regarding state legislatures by aggregating legislative information from all 50 states, Congress, Washington, D.C., and Territories. This information is then standardized, cleaned, and published to the public for free.

Collecting all that legislative data from official sources definitely isn’t all sunshine & rainbows. We’ll cover some of the strangest things we’ve encountered with scraping these sites, as well as some struggles that come with being an open source project.