March 13-19 is Sunshine Week, an annual celebration aimed at promoting transparency. This story is part of a series highlighting OpenSecrets’ work to improve transparency around key areas related to money in politics at the state and federal level.
After 2020 marking the most expensive election cycle in history and federal lobbying spending hitting an all-time high in 2020, the 2022 election cycle is already on track to set records – at the state and federal level.
Donors poured more than $18 billion into political contributions over the two-year 2020 election cycle and gave hundreds of millions of dollars more in 2021.
That’s according to OpenSecrets’ analysis of state campaign finance data as well as Federal Election Commission filings.
Candidates collectively raised about over $9.5 billion during the 2020 election cycle with congressional candidates raising $3.9 billion, presidential candidates raising nearly $4 billion and about $1.7 billion raised by state level candidates across the country.
House and Senate candidates smashed fundraising records, as projected in a joint report by the Center for Responsive Politics and National Institute on Money in Politics prior to joining forces to become OpenSecrets.
OpenSecrets’ databases are used by journalists, academics, advocates and members of the public to shine light on the funding of our nation’s elections at the federal and state levels. Researchers at OpenSecrets strive to collect data on every contribution that candidates, political parties and ballot measure committees disclose to their respective state campaign finance agencies to keep these databases up to robust standards for accuracy and comprehensiveness — a pursuit that requires compiling data from dozens of agencies.
Every state has its own systems and practices in place, requiring researchers to develop expertise in each place in order to provide this essential service. For example, states may or may not have campaign finance databases that can be downloaded. Where databases exist, they may be missing key pieces of information. Sometimes there are unique formatting challenges or quirks related to data defaults when information is missing.
Inconsistency across states can pose even bigger challenges. It is critically important to remember that staff at campaign finance agencies are doing the work in the trenches trying to improve the public’s access to this important information about who is funding our elections. In places where collecting campaign finance data presents challenges, it is important to note that that agencies commonly face a lack of funding, access to technology or statutory authority to collect or better disseminate election funding data.
Below are just some of the issues OpenSecrets factors in to ensure our data is up to journalistic and academic rigor. Many of these hurdles can be difficult to predict, but OpenSecrets is able to accommodate identify them because our researchers have been doing this, for you, for decades.
By identifying committees for which data is needed and vigorously tracking which campaign finance reports have been collected, OpenSecrets researchers are able to identify cases where reports are missing from electronic data and request copies.
- Before many campaign finance agencies had websites, they sent copies of reports in the mail. Those days are now gone…almost. There is one state left in which political committees that have not raised enough money to be required to file reports electronically file them on paper, and where that paper is not scanned to a website.
- In another state, campaigns are allowed to submit reports on paper — often handwritten — and state agency staff do the tedious work of keying the data from those reports into their system where they are legible, but do not key them in when they are illegible. OpenSecrets researchers identify which reports are missing from the data export and either key them in ourselves or document that they are not legible.
Various characteristics of transactions may cause them to not be included in a state’s data exports or may cause them to appear with erroneous information. OpenSecrets researchers keep track of the kinds of transactions we expect to see and know when to make special efforts to get transaction types that are reported but excluded from database exports. Occasionally, we may be aware of something else that causes a transaction to be excluded and know to go look for it. For example:
- Many states have dollar thresholds where, if a contributor gives under that threshold to a campaign, that contribution is not itemized but is instead included in a lump sum of “unitemized contributions.” These sums can add up to a significant percentage of a campaign’s fundraising, meaning that not including them would significantly understate many campaigns’ fundraising totals. There are situations where those unitemized sums are not included in state campaign finance databases and must be gathered from images of reports.
- Other states may exclude candidate self-financing, money raised in fundraisers, loans or loan repayments from their campaign finance databases.
- In at least one state, a blank contributor name will cause that transaction to be excluded from the data export, such as happens sometimes with unitemized sums or unknown contributor names/bad reporting.
- Some states use a common vendor to develop their campaign finance databases, creating interesting results. For example, in a couple of states that use a vendor that Maine also uses,there have been times where contributions that lacked address information erroneously defaulted to coming from Maine.
Campaign Finance Data Gaps
- Contributor addresses are essential for determining which contributions come from the same person. In some states these addresses are not made public or not posted online, and in some states the addresses of donors are not reported at all.
- In one state, contributor addresses, occupation and employer information are not reported, meaning campaign disclosures contain only the contributor’s name and town. That makes it difficult to identify multiple contributions from the same person or the contributors’ economic interests.
- Some state agencies do not consistently make dates of contributions available, making it difficult to look for chronology patterns, such as correlations between contributions from certain industries during discussions of prominent bills in regular or special legislative sessions.
- About 35 states require contributor occupation and/or employment information to be reported in most circumstances, such as after contributing above a certain dollar threshold. In the remaining states, the lack of this information makes it difficult to identify the economic interests of contributors to our country’s political campaigns. However, OpenSecrets’ experts have been able to identify economic interests by comparing contributor names and addresses with the aggregation of datasets at the federal level — where employment information is required to be reported — and datasets from other states.
- Where unitemized sums are not reported, we do the math to subtract itemized contributions for report summary page totals on each filed campaign finance report for each campaign to determine the unitemized sums.
Bringing the Technology
- Some state campaign finance interfaces may exclude certain transactions from electronic databases even though the report images are obviously generated from those databases. Where possible, OpenSecrets creates scrapers specific to each agency’s website to collect those miscellaneous data points. This is an ongoing lift and requires us to stay vigilant, as even small changes to a website can create a need to adjust scrapers to continue maintaining high data collection standards.
Other Challenges
- Sometimes a dataset may not include important documentation, such as the reporting period, report name or report filed date for campaign finance reports, meaning that as OpenSecrets researchers collect the data we must make special efforts to identify which transactions we have collected already and which are new. Transaction dates can be helpful, but they are imperfect when dates are missing or when previous reports were filed after the date of our last collection effort in a state. In addition, if the state has late or large contribution reports, those contributions are typically reported again on regular campaign finance reports, meaning that without the information about which report a transaction is from it takes extra effort to avoid getting the same transaction twice.
- Committee IDs are extremely helpful for purposes of identifying the sequence of campaign finance reports that a campaign is filing. Several states do not implement committee IDs, however, and others do not make them available in data exports. In these cases, we do the extra work to ensure the reports we assign to the version of the committee we create in our database are indeed from the same real committee, such as storing and comparing against committee address information.
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