Downloads

In addition to our API, we offer bulk downloads of bills, bill metadata, committee data, and other datasets intended to facilitate reuse of our data. All data is published under a Creative Commons Zero license.

Bills

Metadata

Description

This is data about the current session’s bills, straight from the legislature’s own severs, where it’s provided as CSV. We have done a simple conversion of this data to JSON, for ease of use on modern platforms.

Example

{
  Bill_id: "HJ117",
  Bill_description: "Constitutional amendment (first resolution); Virginia Redistricting Commission.",
  Patron_id: "H275",
  Patron_name: "Bell, John J.",
  Last_house_committee_id: "H22",
  Last_house_action: "Committee Referral Pending",
  Last_house_action_date: "01/12/16",
  Emergency: "N",
  Passed_house: "N",
  Passed_senate: "N",
  Passed: "N",
  Failed: "N",
  Carried_over: "N",
  Approved: "N",
  Vetoed: "N",
  Full_text_doc1: "HJ117",
  Full_text_date1: "01/12/16",
  Last_house_actid: "H2201",
  Introduction_date: "01/12/16",
  Last_actid: "H2201"
}

Links

Text

Description

This is the text of all bills before the legislature, combined into a ZIP file, archived back to 2006. This is HTML, scraped straight from the legislature’s website.

Links

Legislators

Description

A list of all legislators currently serving in the General Assembly, with their name, chamber, date sworn in, party, district number, district ID, sex, email address, website address, place of residence, coordinates, both LIS IDs, their Richmond Sunlight ID, and their State Board of Elections ID.

Links

Committees

Description

A list of all committees in each chamber, their members, and the position that they hold on that committee.

Example


{
  Senate Transportation: [
    [
      "Sen. Bill Carrico (R-Grayson)",
      "cwcarrico",
      "chair"
    ],
    [
      "Sen. Creigh Deeds (D-Bath)",
      "rcdeeds",
      "member"
    ],
    [
      "Sen. Bill DeSteph (R-Virginia Beach)",
      "wrdesteph",
      "member"
    ],
    [
      "Sen. Dave Marsden (D-Burke)",
      "dwmarsden",
      "member"
    ],
    [
      "Sen. Barbara Favola (D-Arlington)",
      "bafavola",
      "member"
    ],
    [
      "Sen. John Cosgrove (R-Chesapeake)",
      "jacosgrove",
      "member"
    ],
    [
      "Sen. Tom Garrett (R-Lynchburg)",
      "tagarrett",
      "member"
    ]
  ]
}

Links

Changes to Laws

Description

These files correlate bills to the sections of the Code of Virginia that they propose to amend or create.

Example

{
  bill_number: "SB287",
  bill_catch_line: "Prescription Monitoring Program; reports by dispensers shall be made within 24 hours or next day.",
  law: "54.1-2525",
  url: "http://www.richmondsunlight.com/bill/2016/sb287/"
}

Links

  • JSON: Includes the bill number, bill catch line, law identifier, and the bill’s URL. This includes only the current (or most recent) session, and no historical data.
  • CSV: Includes only the year, bill number, and section number affected, going back to 2006.

Video Index

Description

A complete collection of all indices for all legislative session video that we have, going back to 2008. This is basically a series of clips—the time during which a given legislator spoke on the floor of the chamber, or the time during which a given bill was discussed on the floor of the chamber.

Example


{
  path: "https://archive.org/download/vahouse20090115/20090115.mp4",
  date: "2009-01-15",
  chamber: "house",
  time_start: "00:36:42",
  time_end: "00:37:12",
  legislator: "acpollard",
  bill: "HB1634"
}

Links