About the Site

Overview

Richmond Sunlight is a non-partisan website that aggregates information about the General Assembly, the lawmaking body that governs the state of Virginia. It is an independent, volunteer-run website that is in no way affiliated with the Virginia General Assembly or the state government.

The Data

All data about bills—titles, numbers, patrons, text, status, etc.—comes from the General Assembly's Legislative Information System, which is the General Assembly's own service. Some of the data comes in bulk from their FTP CSV service, which is provided for services just such as Richmond Sunlight. Most legislative data is updated hourly, but bill histories (the bill's progress—votes and the like) are updated daily around 2:30pm, because that is when the General Assembly makes that data available.

The remainder of the data is gathered from a variety of resources. Fundraising data comes from the Virginia Public Access Project, election history data comes from the State Board of Elections, and the remainder comes from a variety of resources.

Thanks To