Bill Language Scanner

Recently there has been a rise in bills targeting already vulnerable groups, like queer people and people of color. This tool scans a database of recent state bills for language that is used to hurt.

Comment 1

Inspiration

There is a disturbing and terrifying push recently to legislate away the freedoms of marginalized groups.

What it does

This tool is meant to scan state bills and check for any language that raises red flags. A bill being flagged does not necessarily mean it is oppressive, but it means a further look into it might be warranted. For example, "parental rights" is often used as a euphemism for restricting the freedom of trans children in schools, but is also used in bills about the adoption process after a child is genuinely abused.

How we built it

We used Python to scrape a site for the texts of bills and search for keywords, MySQL as a database to store it, and HTML/CSS/JS for a website to display it.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we tried to pull directly from government sites, but there were too many variations between different states. Next we tried to pull from LegiScan.com, which kept hiding information when we attempted to scrape it, either by some active scraping protection, or perhaps because the site was just that janky. Eventually, we found that we could pull data from openstates.org

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

What's next for Bill Language Scanner

  • fix the issue where some states' bill pdfs can't be read the same way
  • also scan federal bills
  • automatic updating when data changes
Share this project:

Updates