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NYT Vote Scraper is a small but clever project that periodically fetches JSON data from the “Votes Remaining” page of The New York Times during the 2020 U.S. presidential election and commits the results into the repository, effectively using Git as a time-series database. The idea is to create a historical record — including diffs — of how vote counts and “votes remaining” estimates changed over time. The repo outputs multiple formats (HTML, CSV, XML, plain text) so that you or other scripts can easily analyze or visualize how states swung, how margins evolved, and the pace of vote counting. As a result, this scraper provides transparency and traceability: one can examine the “evolution of results” instead of just a snapshot. The project is inspired by the concept of “git-scraping” popularized by Simon Willison — leveraging version control to store changing datasets.
Features
- Periodically scrapes the NYT “Votes Remaining” JSON page during the 2020 election
- Commits results into Git repository over time to track historical evolution and changes (diffs)
- Outputs scraped data in multiple formats: JSON, HTML, CSV, XML, plain text — for easy consumption by tools or humans
- Provides a clear, versioned timeline of state-by-state vote counts and “votes remaining” estimates
- Demonstrates “git-scraping” pattern: using Git as a lightweight time-series storage or archival tool for dynamic data
- Licensed under MIT license, easy to fork or adapt for other data-scraping / archival needs
Project Samples
