If you're a programmer and want to do something politically powerful, write a tool that takes FEC bulk data and dereferences the chains of PAC-to-PAC donations used to obfuscate giving, so we can see clearly which corporations donated to which candidate.
My own interest is tracing dollars given by a specific corporate PAC to the candidate pockets they end up in. Being able to say that Google PAC funds Steve King (via Eye of the Tiger PAC) is useful to me, but I had to follow the chain by hand
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Ok, I see. There's no definitive way in the data to do that, because donations aren't tracked in such a way that it refers to specific funds in a three-entity relationship.
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It's sufficient for my purposes to show that the money went to an entity (or through a chain of entities) that funds such-and-such roster of candidates. It's not necessary to prove that a specific donated dollar wound up in a specific campaign.
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So I'm not sure how you could specifically say that the $ Google gave to Scalise's PAC went to King. The data doesn't give you that assurance, just the behavior.
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Sorry, are you talking now about donations from candidate committees to one another?
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My goal is to get tech company employees to fight to shut down their company PACs by demonstrating to them that the money is going to morally abhorrent causes
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