Federal Election Commission, United States of America (logo). Link to FEC Home Page
Federal Election Commission

Disclosure Data Weblog

Launching Candidate Disbursement Files
Posted by: Bob in Commission Actions
Published: 03:20PM May 11, 2010

It took a little longer than we hoped today, but we've posted the 1,600 or so files of detailed candidate spending for 2010 campaigns, and they're now available via the data catalog. 

(There are a lot of moving parts when you build things in a test environment and then move them to "production" and sometimes these steps prove more challenging than we think they will be.  Having spent a little time in surgical suites in the last week or so, I've become a fan of the standard medical practice of asking really stupid questions over and over -- "which side are we doing today?" -- because they increase the likelihood that nothing is missed, so I'm going to try to implement some of that in our development work.  Most of our folks would rightly tell you that I already ask lots of stupid questions, so I have a head start. But I digress.)

You can choose to download the data in either XML or CSV format, and there is an XML schema that describes the file. You can get data for a specific House district or a Senate race, or choose all of the candidates in a particular state.  You can also try to grab everything for all House or Senate candidates, but that will take a while now and only get worse as the cycle goes along, so think about what you're really trying to accomplish before you hit the download button.

Remember that this is just candidates active in 2010 elections, and includes detailed expenditures reported since January 1, 2009.

This represents a big step for us, long overdue, so let us know what you think and share any ideas you have for making it better.  We continue to work on a process for flexible searches of these data and we'll let you know as we get closer to completing that project.

Also let us know what you'd like to see added to the catalog next.  We're planning a process that is similar to this one for detailed receipts, and we'll also create files that focus on just itemized independent expenditures, electioneering communications, and lobbyist bundling of contributions, and summaries of committee activity for each month or quarter during an election cycle, but let us know if there is other information that would be helpful.

Permalink  |  Comments[7]

Comments:

Hi Bob, Let me add my applause to the chorus of grateful recipients of the Senate expenditure data. We really do appreciate it. I've got a question here for you on the details of the data. For example, we process the House expenditures using electronic filing. That data is unique on filer and transid only for a specific report. But it doesn't look to me like there is a report field in the data that you've released here. So, can we assume that you've removed all the duplicates here? This example is obviously not a duplicate as filer C00458240 has two transactions with an id of SB0406082210307 -- one is to a florist for $72 and the other is to a gas station for $58. But for filer C00457010 and transid SB041608211013, both are for exactly the same vendor in the same amount on the same day. There are about a dozen such cases in today's file. Thanks again, Bob. Susi

Posted by Susi on May 12, 2010 at 12:11 PM EDT #

Thanks again, Bob, for making these records available. I too have a question about the structure of the data. How do I get around double counting lump credit-card payments and the itemized individual charges on credit cards?

Posted by Matt Stiles on May 13, 2010 at 12:11 PM EDT #

Thanks Matt and Susi - Susi, There shouldn't be any duplicates in the files, but we're looking into the specific example you found and we'll let you know what we find out. Matt, The easiest way to correct for double reporting for House candidates is to ignore any transaction where the field called "memo code" has an X. That's how the committees are supposed to do their calculations of totals. It's trickier for Senate campaigns since we're doing all of the entry ourselves from those reports. In these cases you could either ignore all the records where the "memo text" field has the word memo in it or you could look for payments to banks that are clearly credit card payments (but not payments of bank fees) and ignore those. In cases where you want to know who really got paid in these transactions, this last approach might work best.

Posted by Bob Biersack on May 13, 2010 at 12:25 PM EDT #

That data is unique on filer and transid only for a specific report. But it doesn't look to me like there is a report field in the data that you've released here. So, can we assume that you've removed all the duplicates here?

Posted by HostGator on May 28, 2010 at 08:35 AM EDT #

yes -- we've identified the most recent amendment for each filing and include only the most recent data in these disbursement files -- so (in theory) there should not be any duplicates in the files - unless a committee included the same transaction twice in a single filing.

Posted by Bob Biersack on May 28, 2010 at 09:17 AM EDT #

Hi Bob -- How often do you plan on updating this data? Will you note it on the blog when there are updates?

Posted by Nick Judd on June 15, 2010 at 11:15 AM EDT #

Nick, We update these files every morning with whatever we've received and processed through the night before. I'll add a post to make sure everyone understands that. Thanks

Posted by Bob Biersack on June 15, 2010 at 01:28 PM EDT #

Post a Comment:
  • HTML Syntax: Allowed