[iamdave]

It doesn't scale very well, unless you have a lot of patience...but I've had immense success using the importxml() function in Google sheets to compile raw election data while I did some freelance work for the Texas Libertarian party a couple of years ago.

Outside of that, I did often find myself building my own tools with a combination of ruby, nokogiri and mechanize. Partly out of a desire to learn something new, and partly many of my use scenarios didn't require anything more complex than "Go to these pages, get the data within these elements and throw a CSV file over there".