Many thanks to all of the candidates for statewide and legislative office who answered our plea for campaign finance reports last month. And our apologies to those who took issue with the headline “Transparency Winners.”
This time, we’re not asking candidates to send us their spreadsheets by Monday’s filing deadline. It’s not because we don’t believe sharing candidates’ fundraising details with Vermonters in a timely manner is important — it is. Rather, it is because Secretary of State Jim Condos has made campaign report filing, and our job of sharing the information, easier this time.
Candidates can now file their campaign finance reports directly into the secretary of state’s new database.
We encourage the 43 candidates who filed their July reports with us, as well as those who didn’t, to utilize the state site this time as a good trial for next year, when it will become mandatory for candidates to file online. VTDigger supports the effort by Condos and his team to make this information available to Vermonters in real time. It is a significant step toward improving government transparency in Vermont.
Our readers may well wonder how VTDigger’s campaign finance database differs from the Secretary of State’s website.
Over the course of this election cycle, candidates can voluntarily submit donation amounts online for August through December 2014 to the Secretary of State. The secretary will also continue to accept entries in PDF format during this period. But complete donation data won’t be available through the secretary’s website in searchable format until 2015.
VTDigger has created a relational database for campaign finance information that aggregates and connects candidates with contributors by type. Our searchable database will include all of the contributions for this election cycle (2013-2014). Next week we plan to update the database with contributions through the August 2014 filing deadline.
In addition, we will be posting information going back to 2009. Over the summer, we hired two interns to help us clean, curate and enter data from the current 2014 reporting periods and the 2009-2010 election cycle. Our objective is to offer readers historical trend data that gauge shifts in political allegiance over time. Many thanks to the Lintilhac Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation for making this work possible.
VTDigger’s campaign database cross-references candidates and donors.
The data is aggregated by donor and election cycle so that readers can see the total amount any donor gave to all candidates. You can also search by donor type — businesses, unions, trade associations, etc.
In addition, you can click on a candidate campaign finance profile and get total amount raised, plus a quick read on how much of his or her money comes from out of state vs. in state. Our interactive graphs also show how much businesses, wealthy individuals and small donors who give $100 or less to a given candidate.
Importantly, we connect individual donors to their businesses and families so readers can see networks of influence on elections and politics. Soon we will also connect donors who receive general contracts from state government.
VTDigger’s database will also feature donations to registered PACs, which have never been available before, and a searchable database of media buys.
As the Secretary of State makes raw data available, we will continue to clean and curate the data in order to help readers put campaign finance information in context. Our goal is to make it easy to see how money influences elections.
To see how it works, go visit our campaign finance database.