Ballotpedia.org Scraper

What does Ballotpedia.org Scraper do?

Ballotpedia.org Scraper extracts political encyclopedia content from ballotpedia.org. It navigates search pages and article detail pages to collect structured content including ballot measures, legislation, lawsuit news, and political information. The scraper supports exporting the extracted dataset via REST API and standard download formats.

Ballotpedia.org Scraper

This actor collects political content and encyclopedia articles from Ballotpedia.org. It targets search/listing pages to discover article URLs and detail pages to extract the full content (HTML and cleaned text). The output is normalized per-article JSON items suitable for research, analysis, and content aggregation.

What data can I extract from Ballotpedia.org with this actor?

The actor extracts structured article and content data. Typical fields include:

url	Article URL on ballotpedia.org
title	Page title
pageHtml	Full HTML content of the article body
pageText	Clean text content with whitespace normalized and formatted for readability

Why scrape Ballotpedia.org?

Political encyclopedia data is useful for research, analysis, monitoring, and content aggregation. Scraping Ballotpedia.org enables:

• Tracking ballot measures and legislative activity across states
• Monitoring political news and lawsuit developments
• Building databases of political and electoral information
• Research on initiative, referendum, and recall processes
• Historical analysis of political trends and legal cases

How to use Ballotpedia.org Scraper?

Quick start guide:

1. Create or log into your Apify account.
2. Open the Ballotpedia.org Scraper actor on Apify.
3. Click Try for free or run the actor with your configuration.
4. Provide one or more startUrls (search pages with query results).
5. Set maxItems to limit how many articles to process per start URL.
6. Start the actor and wait for completion; download results as JSON/CSV/Excel/NDJSON.

Input

The actor accepts the following input parameters:

• startUrls (array of objects) - Required. URLs to start crawling from. Use search pages with query results to discover articles.
• maxItems (integer) - Maximum number of articles to scrape per start URL. Default: 3.
• proxyConfiguration (object) - Proxy configuration for crawling. Residential proxies are recommended for reliability.

Supported URL Types

Search Page Example:

• https://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php?search=ballot+measure&title=Special%3ASearch&profile=default&fulltext=1
• https://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php?search=lawsuit&title=Special%3ASearch&profile=default&fulltext=1

Example input:

{
    "startUrls": [
        {
            "url": "https://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php?search=ballot+measure&title=Special%3ASearch&profile=default&fulltext=1"
        },
        {
            "url": "https://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php?search=referendum&title=Special%3ASearch&profile=default&fulltext=1"
        }
    ],
    "maxItems": 5,
    "proxyConfiguration": {
        "useApifyProxy": true,
        "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"],
        "apifyProxyCountry": "US"
    }
}

Note: The startUrls field is required and we can only scrape from a search page.

Output

The scraped data is saved as a dataset. Each item represents one article with its content. You can download the output in JSON, JSONL, CSV, Excel, or NDJSON.

Sample output (one dataset item):

{
    "url": "https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_measure_lawsuit_news",
    "title": "Ballot measure lawsuit news - Ballotpedia",
    "pageHtml": "<div class=\"mw-parser-output\"><table style=\"border-spacing:8px; margin:0px -8px;\">...</table></div>",
    "pageText": "Ballot measure lawsuit breaking news Ballot Law Update: 2014 Year in Review By Josh Altic This edition of the Ballot Law Update features a year-end summary of legislation proposed in 2014 concerning laws governing the powers of initiative, referendum and recall. Of the 113 bills Ballotpedia tracked, 13 were approved in 5 states, while three were carried over to next year, and 97 were defeated..."
}

Notes and Limitations

• The actor depends on the current Ballotpedia.org page structure. If the site changes, the actor may require updates.
• Use the actor in compliance with Ballotpedia.org terms of service and applicable laws.
• If you encounter blocking, try running with residential proxies and reasonable concurrency settings.
• The pageText field is cleaned to remove excessive whitespace, tabs, and newlines for better readability.
• Residential proxies are required: Ballotpedia.org has anti-bot measures that detect and block datacenter proxies. Running without residential proxies will result in frequent blocking and failed requests. This is why residential proxies are enabled by default in the input schema.

Looking to Scrape more News Websites?

In addition to this actor, you can explore our suite of dedicated scrapers. Each scraper is optimized for its target site to provide accurate, structured, and reliable data extraction.

Scraper	Region	Description
Ynet.co.il Scraper	Isreal	Scrape news content from ynet.co.il to gather headlines, summaries, and metadata. Ideal for news aggregation, market analysis, and tracking real-time trends. Fast, structured, and customizable extraction from an Israel-based source.
ElEspanol.com Scraper	Spain	Scrape news content from El Español - including headlines, summaries, article bodies, authors, and publish dates. Ideal for news aggregation, market analysis, and trend tracking. Fast, structured, and customizable extraction from Spain’s leading news source.
Construction Dive Scraper	USA	Construction Dive scraper for USA construction news and press releases: extract articles, contacts, images, and metadata from ConstructionDive.com Deep Dive section for construction tech, PR, and market research workflows.

Explore these solutions to expand your data collection capabilities.

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Image Credit

Image credit: https://ballotpedia.org