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.
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Each PAC and candidate committee has a unique identifier in FEC records. Candidate committees are allowed to donate to one another (within limits) so there is no guarantee that it's an acyclic graph. The world being full of smart people, it's possible this tool exists already
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Replying to @Pinboard
I've been working with FEC data for 20 years and I'm not sure the problem you're trying to solve here. The data already has this information. Can you say more?
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Replying to @derekwillis
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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Replying to @Pinboard
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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Replying to @derekwillis
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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Replying to @Pinboard
All of which can be done using the bulk data: https://www.fec.gov/files/bulk-downloads/2018/oth18.zip …
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Replying to @derekwillis
That's what I'm asking people for, a script to automate this analysis of the bulk data.
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Replying to @Pinboard
That's also what
@OpenSecretsDC has been doing for years.1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
It is! But I haven't been able to find the scripts to do this analysis myself off of FEC bulk data, most likely because I'm a beginner and don't know where to look for them.
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