nl-voting-data-scraper

Scrape Dutch voting advice (StemWijzer) data across live and archived elections: municipal, national, European, or provincial.

Outputs structured JSON with party positions, policy statements, and metadata. Reusable across election cycles, including historical timeline analysis.

Key Features

• Hybrid scraping: API-first (fast HTTP) with Playwright browser automation fallback
• Historical extraction: Works against archived StemWijzer apps when live API endpoints no longer exist
• Multiple capture modes: Direct API fetch, runtime JSON.parse capture, page-global extraction, and JS bundle parsing
• Election-agnostic: Municipal, national (Tweede Kamer), European Parliament, and provincial elections
• Historical timeline ready: Includes archived parliamentary elections back to 2006
• CLI + Library: Use from the command line or import in Python
• Caching & resume: File-based cache for interrupted batch scrapes
• Rate limiting: Token-bucket rate limiter with exponential backoff
• Base64/AES decoding: Handles encoded StemWijzer API responses automatically
• Structured output: Legacy flat JSON layout or engine-friendly snapshot layout for downstream apps

Installation

pip install nl-voting-data-scraper

For browser automation fallback and archived elections:

pip install "nl-voting-data-scraper[browser]"
playwright install chromium

Quick Start

CLI

# List known elections
nl-voting-data-scraper list-elections

# Scrape all municipalities for 2026 municipal elections
nl-voting-data-scraper scrape gr2026 -o ./output

# Scrape a specific municipality
nl-voting-data-scraper scrape gr2026 -m GM0014 -o ./output

# Scrape a live national election
nl-voting-data-scraper scrape tk2025 -o ./output

# Scrape an archived historical election
nl-voting-data-scraper scrape tk2017 --browser-only -o ./output

# Write engine snapshots for downstream apps
nl-voting-data-scraper scrape tk2023 --layout engine -o ./snapshots

# List municipalities for an election
nl-voting-data-scraper list-municipalities gr2026

# Discover endpoints and browser capture details
nl-voting-data-scraper discover tk2021

Python Library

import asyncio

from nl_voting_data_scraper import StemwijzerScraper


async def main():
    async with StemwijzerScraper("tk2023") as scraper:
        results = await scraper.scrape()
        for data in results:
            print(
                f"{data.votematch.name}: "
                f"{len(data.parties)} parties, {len(data.statements)} statements"
            )

    async with StemwijzerScraper("gr2026") as scraper:
        data = await scraper.scrape_one("GM0014")
        if data:
            print(f"Municipality: {data.votematch.name}")


asyncio.run(main())

Supported Elections

Slug	Type	Year	Source mode	Notes
gr2026	Municipal	2026	Live API + browser fallback	258+ municipalities
tk2025	National	2025	Live API + browser fallback	Single national contest
eu2024	European	2024	Live API + browser fallback	Single national contest
tk2023	National	2023	Live API + browser fallback	Single national contest
ps2023	Provincial	2023	Live API + browser fallback	Multi-jurisdiction provincial dataset
tk2021	National	2021	Archived browser extraction	Wayback-backed
tk2017	National	2017	Archived browser extraction	Wayback-backed
tk2012	National	2012	Archived browser extraction	Wayback-backed
tk2010	National	2010	Archived browser extraction	Wayback-backed
tk2006	National	2006	Archived browser extraction	Wayback-backed

Unknown election slugs still fall back to auto-detected URL patterns through the library API.

Historical Extraction

Archived elections do not always expose the modern JSON index/data endpoints anymore. For those cases, the scraper can recover contest payloads from the frontend itself:

1. Live API fetch when a data endpoint still exists.
2. Runtime capture by intercepting JSON.parse(...) before the app boots.
3. Page-global extraction for older builds that expose config, objectNames, or related globals.
4. Static bundle parsing for embedded JSON, URL-encoded JSON, or base64-wrapped payloads.

For archived elections, install the browser extra and Chromium. --browser-only is the safest mode when you already know the election is archive-backed.

How It Works

graph TD
    A[StemwijzerScraper\nOrchestrator] --> B[API Scraper\nPrimary]
    A --> C[Browser Scraper\nFallback]
    B --> D[HTTP fetch + base64 decode]
    C --> E[Playwright runtime capture\nbrowser state + JS bundles]
    D --> F[Structured JSON\nper election]
    E --> F

Loading

1. API-first (fast): Fetches data from StemWijzer data endpoints via HTTP. Handles base64-encoded responses and optional AES decryption.
2. Browser fallback: If the API fails or no longer exists, Playwright loads the frontend and captures usable contest payloads from runtime state, page globals, or JS bundles.
3. Synthetic indexing for single contests: When archived national or EU elections expose the contest but not the legacy index, the scraper generates a stable single-entry index automatically.

Output Layouts

Legacy layout

The default legacy layout matches the original package behavior:

output/
  index.json
  GM0014.json
  tk2023.json
  combined.json  # optional

Engine layout

Use --layout engine to write a reusable snapshot structure for downstream applications:

output/
  tk2023/
    index.json
    manifest.json
    raw/
      tk2023.json

The engine layout is especially useful when another project wants to ingest scraped elections directly without any post-processing.

Output Format

Each output entry contains structured party, statement, and contest metadata:

{
  "parties": [
    {
      "id": 206919,
      "name": "Party Name",
      "fullName": "Full Party Name",
      "website": "https://...",
      "hasSeats": true,
      "statements": [
        { "id": 206987, "position": "agree", "explanation": "..." }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "statements": [
    {
      "id": 206987,
      "theme": "Housing",
      "title": "The municipality should build more affordable housing.",
      "index": 1
    }
  ],
  "shootoutStatements": [],
  "votematch": {
    "id": 206918,
    "name": "Municipality Name",
    "context": "2026GR",
    "remote_id": "GM0014",
    "langcode": "nl"
  }
}

CLI Options

nl-voting-data-scraper scrape ELECTION [OPTIONS]

Options:
  -m, --municipality TEXT   Specific GM codes (repeatable)
  -l, --language TEXT       Languages to scrape (default: nl)
  -o, --output TEXT         Output directory (default: ./output)
  --layout [legacy|engine]  Output layout (default: legacy)
  --combined                Also write combined.json
  --rate-limit FLOAT        Requests per second (default: 2.0)
  --no-cache                Disable caching
  --resume                  Resume interrupted scrape from cache
  --browser-only            Only use browser scraping
  --api-only                Only use API scraping
  -v, --verbose             Verbose output

Development

git clone https://github.com/rhnfzl/nl-voting-data-scraper.git
cd nl-voting-data-scraper
pip install -e ".[dev,browser]"
playwright install chromium
ruff check src/ tests/
ruff format --check src/ tests/
mypy src/
pytest -v
python -m build

Release

The repository publishes to PyPI from GitHub Releases:

1. Update the package version in pyproject.toml and src/nl_voting_data_scraper/__init__.py.
2. Push to main.
3. Create a GitHub Release such as v0.3.0.
4. The publish.yml workflow builds the package and uploads it to PyPI.

Acknowledgements

Inspired by afvanwoudenberg/stemwijzer.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.