Badger Politics

Explore Wisconsin politics through official public records.

Badger Politics is a free, independent, open-source resource for residents, journalists, researchers, and civic developers. Follow bills, votes, campaign finance, and elections across Wisconsin state government, its members of Congress, and covered city councils.

Records link back to official sources so you can check the evidence yourself. See coverage for available history and gaps.

Badger Politics is an independent project, not affiliated with the State of Wisconsin.

Start exploring

• Find your representatives and explore their records.
• Browse bills and votes to see what was proposed and how legislators voted.
• Explore campaign finance by reporting period, with links to official records.
• Follow Wisconsin's members of Congress or city council records.
• Use the data: JSON API, feeds, and calendars without an API key.

Working on the code? Start with local development, architecture, and data sources.

What is on the site

Section	What it holds
Bills	Every proposal in every session since 2009, with status, sponsors, the LRB plain-language analysis, fiscal estimates, companion bills (from the Legislature's own See Also links), and the full official history with legislator names linked
Roll calls	Every recorded floor vote, name by name, with party splits and the reader's own legislators pinned
Legislators	Profiles with bills led, key votes selected by rule, votes against party, floor attendance by day, committees, campaign money while in office, compensation, and the complete paged record
Districts and Find My Legislators	Address to district entirely in the browser (Census geocoder for coordinates, bundled LTSB boundaries for the match); nothing is stored anywhere but the device
Committees	Members, hearings, and the bills that died in each committee without a hearing
Hearing None	The graveyard: bills that were referred, never heard, and failed at session's end
Calendar	Hearings and election days, with iCal feeds and WisconsinEye recordings where they exist; readers who saved an address in a covered city also see their own council's upcoming meetings, on that device only
New Laws, Governor's Desk, Veto Tracker, Partial Veto	Acts by biennium with passage tallies; bills awaiting signature; every veto, partial veto and override attempt; how the partial veto works
Campaign Money	Receipts to sitting legislators by two-year reporting period (the current period by default, all available history on request, an optional filter to receipts during recorded service), contributing committees, and outside spending filing by filing with the Ethics Commission's transaction IDs and report links
Federal Delegation	Both U.S. senators and all eight House members, with every floor roll call from the Senate's and House Clerk's own XML (Senate from the 112th Congress, House from 2005)
City Councils	Milwaukee, Madison, Appleton, Waukesha and West Allis recorded votes, member profiles, attendance, source links, feeds and JSON. Partial history is labeled. Verified district maps and address lookup currently cover Milwaukee and West Allis.
2026 Ballot	Statewide offices and every legislative seat, with a personal "what is on my ballot" view from the saved district
Following	Device-only follows for bills, legislators, committees, districts and races, with what changed since the last visit

Every page links its official source and carries the independence disclaimer.

Architecture

openstates-scrapers (wi, pinned, CLI-only)    ┐
docs.legis member pages, subject index, LRB   │
WEC ballot access + certified canvasses       ├─→ archived raw data (_data/) → SQLite → integrity gates → data products + Astro static build → Firebase Hosting
CFIS tRPC API (campaignfinance.wi.gov)        │
WisconsinEye (private archive import)         │
Senate LIS + House Clerk roll-call XML        ┘

SQLite is the only database and is rebuilt from the archived raw data on every run (pipeline/run.sh). The served site is fully static: no servers, no functions, no runtime LLM calls. Target infrastructure cost is about $2 a month plus domains.

Releases run in GitHub Actions, never from a laptop: a push to main rehearses on dev, and production is a deliberate promotion (workflow_dispatch). CI builds from the newest database snapshot in a private bucket and runs every gate before publishing. See docs/deploys.md. The nightly parser uses sequential, resumable GitHub Actions jobs and private GCS checkpoints. Scheduled runs require a seeded archive and NIGHTLY_PARSER_ENABLED=true; see the parser runbook.

Data sources

Data	Source	Mechanism
Bills, actions, votes, hearings	docs.legis.wisconsin.gov	openstates-scrapers pinned as a git submodule, invoked only as a CLI (os-update); fixes live in pipeline/patches/
LRB analyses, companion bills, fiscal documents	docs.legis bill and proposal pages	fetched once per URL into an on-disk cache; companions come only from the page's own See Also links
Legislator roster, photos, committees, service terms	openstates people files, docs.legis membership listings, openstates legacy CSV (2009-2012)	session-windowed rosters; human-verified curation tables for merges, aliases, terms and departures
Capitol office contacts	docs.legis member pages	refreshed each run; sitting members only
Subject index	docs.legis subject index	headings as printed; each entry attributed to the heading its document path names (the index's continuation pages overlap), matched by exact session and identifier
Hearing recordings	WisconsinEye	metadata matched by exact date and committee title; links out, never hosted
Candidates and election results (legislature, statewide offices, U.S. House)	Wisconsin Elections Commission	before the primary, the ballot-access report, every row accounted for against each office's printed subtotal; after it, each party's nominee from the certified primary canvass under Wis. Stat. 8.16 plus the independents the Commission approved, with anything the records cannot settle shown as open (rulings with an official basis in importer/wec_rulings.json); certified ward-by-ward canvasses for results
Statewide ballot questions	Commission referendum notice; docs.legis enrolled resolutions	each question kept only when its enrolled resolution states it for that election, names a first consideration whose history agrees, and carries the constitution text word for word as the preceding Legislature approved it (importer/import_amendments.py)
District boundaries	LTSB 2024 official files	bundled GeoJSON; the Census geocoder is used for address-to-point only
Campaign finance	CFIS tRPC API (campaignfinance.wi.gov)	legislator receipts in monthly windows since 2008-01 through a verified committee map; every other filer's money since 2025-01, including independent expenditures with their report IDs; the newest two months are re-read nightly and older months on a rotating audit

Data mandates

These are hard rules. A change that violates one is wrong even if it works.

1. SQLite is the only database. No Cloud SQL, Firestore, or Postgres.
2. Integrity gates block deploys and are never weakened to make a run pass. Fix the scraper or importer, or let the run fail. When source data is genuinely defective, the gate is re-specified narrowly, the reasoning documented in code, and the behavior surfaced, never silently loosened.
3. Attribution never guesses.
   • Votes and sponsorships resolve against per-session, per-chamber rosters. An ambiguous name is a build failure. Upstream duplicates and gaps are fixed only via the human-verified curation tables (person_merges, person_aliases, person_terms, term_events, vote_corrections, candidate_committees), each entry with its basis.
   • Campaign committees auto-link only on unambiguous full-name matches; surname-only committee names ("Testin for Senate") always go through human curation. Committees whose office words do not match a legislative seat are excluded from auto-matching.
   • Donors aggregate by CFIS entity id, never by name.
   • Federal positions are attributed by the Senate's LIS id or the House's bioguide id on each vote record; there is no name matching.
   • Site-side name-to-profile links resolve only exact, unique names.
4. Coverage gaps over inference. A legislator without a verified committee link shows "isn't linked yet", never $0. A member whose linked committees have zero receipts in all recorded history is treated as unlinked (an all-time zero is a mapping gap, not a fact).
5. Money framing ships with the data. Corporations cannot contribute to Wisconsin candidates; PAC money is the PAC's, not a corporate payment; occupations are donor-reported; a contribution is not an endorsement of a vote. Donations are never displayed next to votes. Site pages name the largest individual donors, as the public filings do; the API, feeds and downloads carry individual donors only in aggregate. Totals follow the selected two-year reporting period, with an optional filter to receipts during recorded legislative service. Outside spending is shown one filing at a time, as filed, with the Commission's transaction ID and the report it appeared on; nothing is summed by stance.
6. Provenance filtering. Rows with source='legiscan', if ever present, never appear in any export. Site pages may show them, credited to LegiScan and linked, under its CC BY 4.0 license. FollowTheMoney data is cross-check input only and is never read by the importer or the site build. Org logos render only for entities in site/src/data/org-domains.json, each entry human-verified with a dated basis string, re-verified by the fetcher before download.

Verification gates

Pipeline (importer/checks.py, every run; a failure aborts before any snapshot is written):

• Roll-call yes/no sums reconcile exactly with the official counts; NV is all-or-none (docs.legis sometimes omits the NV name list).
• Bill counts per session cannot fall more than 2% against the previous run.
• Referential integrity across every table: votes to people and events, events to bills, bills to sessions, actions and sponsorships to bills, contributions to people and to a live committee mapping, no committee mapped to two people, no person twice on one roll call, no vote outside a recorded service term, every sitting member with a live term and office contacts, hearing chairs and videos resolving, committee money tracing to a known filer, advocacy rows naming both candidate and race.
• Federal: recounted Senate tallies equal the stated yeas and nays, every Senate vote carries exactly two Wisconsin senators, House rows are Wisconsin-only, and the delegation holds ten members.
• Council votes: every vote traces to the tenant's own member id and vocabulary, every meeting and item links its public page, every sitting member has a seat, every committee assignment names a known member, and a tenant with no dissenting vote on record fails (a fetch that stopped at consent items).
• CFIS: every fetched month reconciles exactly against the server's own transaction count (the newest month retries, and accepts a stable mismatch only when a plain-view diff proves every omitted row is outside our data). Month windows end at 23:59:59 because bare date bounds drop rows with timezone-artifact times. A rotating audit re-fetches three archived months each run and refreshes any the state amended.

Site (site/scripts/, run against a build; CI runs all of them before a release):

Script	Checks
preflight.mjs	the built tree matches the database it came from: every session, one page per bill, legislator and roll call, a search index at least as large as the bill count, data products present, disclaimer shipped
verify.mjs	11 functional checks in headless Chrome: search quality and junk-match rejection, address lookup to the right two legislators, roll-call pinning, rep highlighting, Hearing None banner, LRB analysis, disclaimer, analytics
a11y.mjs	axe-core WCAG 2.2 AA over 41 representative pages at desktop and 360px; 0 violations required
responsive.mjs	no horizontal overflow on the same 41 pages at 344/360/412/540/768/1280/1920px
links.mjs	every internal path and fragment anchor resolves; --external probes deduplicated outbound URLs with per-host pacing
csp.mjs	run against the released site: the Content-Security-Policy breaks neither search (WebAssembly) nor the address lookup (Census JSONP)
measure.mjs	diagnostic, not a gate: names the element that overflows one page at one width, with --wide-font to reproduce a Linux-only failure on Windows

The two browser gates share one page list (scripts/lib/serve.mjs), so a page added to one is scanned by both.

Data products

Everything on the site is also data, keyless: a static JSON API under /api/v1/ (more than 41,000 files: bills, roll calls, legislators, committees and hearings, subjects, seats and election results, the federal delegation's roll calls, city councils, and campaign money in separate files, with individual donors only in aggregate; the layout is in api.py), Atom feeds per bill, legislator, committee, seat and subject, plus a weekly digest and feeds of new laws, vetoes and outside-spending filings (more than 20,600), iCal calendars for every hearing and for election days (845), per-session CSVs, and a provenance-filtered SQLite snapshot. See /data/.

The bulk files are published to GitHub Releases by each production deploy (never served from the site origin), always at the same addresses:

• https://github.com/uprightsleepy/badger-politics/releases/latest/download/badger-politics-csv.zip
• https://github.com/uprightsleepy/badger-politics/releases/latest/download/wi-filtered.sqlite.gz
• https://github.com/uprightsleepy/badger-politics/releases/latest/download/SHA256SUMS
• https://github.com/uprightsleepy/badger-politics/releases/latest/download/README.txt

Like the API and feeds, they leave out LegiScan rows and lobbying registrations, and individual donors appear only in aggregate (their receipts keep amount, date and recipient, without name, occupation or filer id).

Coverage

Data	Coverage
Bills, actions, roll calls	2011-12 through 2025-26 full; 2009-10 partial (official pages list vote totals, not names)
Legislator campaign finance	electronic records 2008 to present, for members with a verified committee link (docs/curation-worklist.md holds the human-verification queue)
Committee, PAC and outside spending	every filer's transactions since January 2025
Lobbying	Withheld from public pages and exports pending an approved source
Election results	certified WEC canvasses: legislative seats in every general election from 2014 (each labeled with the district maps it was held under), statewide offices 2014 and 2022, Supreme Court and Court of Appeals races from 2020, statewide referendum questions of 2014 and 2023-2025
Federal roll calls	U.S. Senate from the 112th Congress (2011); U.S. House from 2005
Council votes	Milwaukee from 2008; Madison from 2025 with five new meetings per run and visible backfill progress; West Allis from 2015 (earlier minutes record votes inconsistently). Expansion order and source review.

Local development

Prerequisites: uv, Node 22, Docker (scrapes only), Google Chrome (headless test harnesses; Edge is the fallback, or set BROWSER_PATH).

Pipeline

cd pipeline
uv run pytest                            # 114 tests
uv run ruff check .
uv run ./run.sh --local --skip-deploy    # full chain: scrape, import, enrich, check, build
uv run python -m importer.checks ../data/wi.sqlite
uv run python -m scraper.backfill        # historical sessions (idempotent)

Scrapes run in the vendored container: python -m scraper.scrape bills wraps docker compose run --rm scrape against pipeline/vendor/openstates-scrapers/docker-compose.yml. os-update wipes its output at run start, so never run two scrapes concurrently, and never build the site while the importer is rebuilding the database.

The optional FTM_API_KEY lives in gitignored pipeline/.env; its enrichment degrades gracefully without it.

Site

cd site
npm ci
npm run dev                          # against ../data/wi.sqlite
npm run build                        # current biennium only, for fast iteration
BUILD_SESSIONS=all npm run build      # full history; what CI releases
npx astro check                      # TypeScript; 0 errors expected
node scripts/preflight.mjs
node scripts/responsive.mjs && node scripts/a11y.mjs && node scripts/verify.mjs && node scripts/links.mjs

CYCLE (default 2026) selects the active election year in run.sh.

Repo layout

Path	Contents
pipeline/scraper/	fetchers for every source; http.py is the one HTTP session (identifying User-Agent, retries, page cache), cfis_api.py the one CFIS client
pipeline/importer/	importers, enrichment, checks.py (the gates), schema.sql (the entire data model), and the human-verified curation JSON
pipeline/dataproducts/	JSON API, Atom feeds, iCal, bulk exports
pipeline/patches/	documented fixes applied to the pinned scraper at runtime
pipeline/_data/	archived raw scrapes and API responses (the rebuild source; gitignored)
site/	Astro 7 + Tailwind 4 + Pagefind; src/lib/db.ts is the only database access, src/lib/wire.ts the contract between build-time JSON and browser scripts
site/scripts/	the build-time logo fetcher, preflight, and the browser harnesses
.github/workflows/	ci.yml (lint, tests, typecheck, workflow guards, tofu validate) and deploy.yml (gated release from a snapshot)
infra/	OpenTofu for the CI deploy identity: the enabled APIs, the Workload Identity pool and provider GitHub federates into, the deployer service account, and its hosting and snapshot-bucket IAM bindings
docs/	plan, deploy runbook, backfill record, money methodology, cross-check reports, curation worklist, and research/ notes behind each module

Contributing

Corrections are the highest-priority issues: open one here. Pull requests to main need the code owner's approval and a green CI run (lint, tests, schema, typecheck, workflow guards, tofu validate); only the owner pushes directly. Please keep the data mandates above in mind: a change that makes a number look better by guessing is not a fix.

Licensing

Code is Apache-2.0. Legislative, election and campaign finance data comes from Wisconsin public records. Archived lobbying data is withheld from publication; federal roll calls are U.S. government works. openstates-scrapers is GPL-3.0, subprocess-only (see mandate 7). FollowTheMoney data is CC BY-NC-SA and is not redistributed.