Scraping county election results on election night without getting blocked (or getting it wrong)
Primary season means I spend a lot of evenings refreshing county results pages. Here's how our desk does it, after some years and some embarrassing mistakes (mine). 1. Call the county first Seriously. Many counties publish a JSON or CSV feed behind the pretty results page, and many use the same few results vendors, so once you know one feed format you know a lot of them. Ask the elections office what the official…