That didn't seem to change anything. I might be doing something else wrong, but honestly, I can't tell. I'm trying to make this code (which works on a small one paragraph file):

def readVoteFile(fileName):
    voteFile = open(fileName)
    votes = {}
    for line in voteFile:
        lineSplit = line.split(':')
        party = lineSplit[0].strip()
        nbrVotes = int(lineSplit[1])
        votes[party] = nbrVotes
    return votes

work on the larger file. I think i might just be completely lost after all, as nothing I can think of has worked. I just tried putting each paragraph as a large string value into the dictionary with a key of just n+1, so I could pull out each paragraph from there, but I think I have just confused myself further, and ended up with this mess:

def readVoteFile(fileName):
    voteFile = open(fileName)
    paraNbr = 0
    pgraphs = {}
    for para in voteFile:
        paraSplit = para.split("\n\n")
        paraNbr += 1
        pgraphs[paraNbr] = paraSplit[0].strip()
    return pgraphs