When I wrote my first stories about money in politics, I ran up against the roadblock every political reporter in Vermont has faced: The difficulty of finding out just how much money individuals and their companies and family members give to candidates for office.
The Vermont Secretary of State’s office uses an arcane system for tracking donations, and without investing many hours in the review of hundreds of spreadsheets, it’s nearly impossible to figure out which contributors donate the most to politicians.
Candidates are asked to download an excel form, which they fill out and return to the Secretary of State as paper spreadsheets. The office then scans the reports and puts them on the office website in an unsearchable PDF format.
In 2010, I spent about two weeks scrutinizing candidates’ contributions, and I found that a number of donors had given the maximum amount as individuals ($2,000) and had also contributed $2,000 through businesses — sometimes through as many as four or five limited liability corporations. (This is perfectly legal, by the way.) One of the contributors who gave as an individual and through his companies happened to be David Blittersdorf, a renewable energy entrepreneur, who supported then President Pro Tem of the Senate Peter Shumlin. Another prominent donor to the future governor was Michel Guite, president of Vermont National Telephone Company.
I scrubbed through donations to all five Democratic candidates for the gubernatorial primary that year and scrutinized contributions to Republican Brian Dubie who ran against Shumlin in the General Election. Many of his contributions came from businesses.
It was a time-consuming, less-than-satisfactory process, and I pledged right then and there to do something about it. I envisioned a searchable campaign finance database that would make it easy for readers to sort, filter and analyze donations to candidates.
Right then and there took longer than I expected. Mainly, it took a while to raise the money for the project.
But three and a half years later, thanks to a crack team of data crunchers, namely Sarah Lindberg, John Herrick, Stacey Peters, Diane Zeigler, and funding from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, the Lintilhac Foundation and from our readers, we are pleased to announce the launch of Vermont’s first searchable and comprehensive campaign finance database.
The database features complete lists of donations to candidates for Vermont House, Vermont Senate and statewide seats for the 2011-2012 and 2013-2014 election cycles. It offers information about how much candidates have raised and how much donors have contributed across political campaigns. The data, which originated from followthemoney.org, has been verified by our data team with information from the Secretary of State’s office. We eliminated redundancies in the data and analyzed anomalies to ensure accuracy.
The database makes it easy to search for donors by type: individuals, businesses, political action committees, unions, political parties, trade associations and lobbyists. The database also shows connections — how much individual donors have contributed to campaigns through companies.
Bar charts provide at-a-glance totals for in-state and out-of-state donations to candidates; totals for amounts from individuals versus businesses or family money; and totals by donation size (under $100 versus over $1,000 contributions).
Readers can also use bar charts to compare candidates competing in a particular race.
You might be surprised to find that Gov. Peter Shumlin spent less than half what Republican Randy Brock did in the last election. Or that Rep. Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, raised more than any other House candidate, $15,126. Or that Democratic candidates brought in a whopping $2.56 million, while Republicans raised $1.74 million and Progressive candidates ran on $150,000 total.
VTDigger will roll out iterative queries and new data over the next few months, including a comprehensive database of media buys and donations to political action committees. We also hope to raise enough money to go back in time to the 2009-2010 election in May and June so that Vermonters can have access to historic trend data.
Vermont is one of 12 states that does not offer a searchable database of contributions to political candidates, according to Peter Qist of the National Institute on Money in State Politics (followthemoney.org).
States that do provide searchable databases typically use blank forms that require information about candidates that might not be readily available to citizens, such as a candidate’s full name, zip code and title. VTDigger’s database supplies users with names of donors and candidates that can be scrolled through, along with basic queries to help readers get started.
Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos announced last week his office has hired a firm that will completely overhaul the elections website for $2.8 million. The new site will include voter checklists and real-time election night results, among other improvements. Condos says he hopes to have a campaign finance database — one small facet of the project — ready by July 2014, the next reporting deadline. Because the contract for the project wasn’t available last week, it’s hard to know exactly what the scope of the campaign finance database will be. One thing is for sure, however, Condos says his office will not be posting historic data.
The secretary says he will make the new electronic data for the 2014 election available to VTDigger. We will plug that information into the data framework we’ve already established to help readers analyze the new information.
You can find VTDigger’s Campaign Finance Database under the “Data” tab in the black navigation bar below the VTDigger masthead. We will also be posting the Campaign Finance Database in the Digger Projects section, which is located above the commentary section on the home page.
Hope you enjoy using this new tool.
~Anne Galloway, editor of VTDigger
