Curious about who your employer gives political donations to? Here's how to navigate the FEC website to find that out. Start by going to http://fec.gov and select 'raising' from the 'campaign finance data' pulldown.pic.twitter.com/YRlaJylI9x
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The 'recipient' and 'contributor' boxes are all the tools you need. FEC bins its data by two-year election period, so if you want to look at donations for previous election cycles, choose the appropriate range from the year pulldown.pic.twitter.com/aFMupCXyQW
Let's say we want to find out whether McDonald's donated to Chuck Schumer. Start typing 'McDonald' in the contributor box, and you'll see a list of all matching PACs. Corporate PACs are required to contain the company name. In this case, it's obvious which one we want.pic.twitter.com/fSp6Tie5xM
That code in parentheses (C00063164) is the unique identifier for this particular committee. The identifiers can be important when you have multiple candidates with the same name, or committees that change names. The FEC site shows us a list of everyone this PAC donated to.pic.twitter.com/zhVFth2SWP
Now we add 'Schumer' as the recipient name. There are a bunch here, so we may have to look them up on the FEC site to see which is the one we want. In this case, the topmost one is it.pic.twitter.com/V3XgAKXy0g
If you're in doubt, you can look up the committee on the FEC site, or just Google the committee ID. In this case, it appears that second 'Friends of Schumer' is Chuck Schumer's committee back when he was a House member. He's always had so many friends!pic.twitter.com/MFtQlSTah2
Putting it all together, we see that McDonald's PAC gave Chuck Schumer $2500 on June 26. We can open the detail arrow to learn more about the donation.pic.twitter.com/ENSJktk93t
Two useful things here are the 'year to date' number, and the link back to the original image, which takes you to the actual filing the information was reported in. Note here that McDonald's is donating to Schumer's 2022 primary campaign. Such admirable foresight!pic.twitter.com/fspclY3eRP
You can use this same method to look up donations by individual people (check Elon Musk's donations for a laugh), see who is funding corporate PACs, and while away many an idle hour. Just keep a barf bucket handy because this whole campaign finance system is obscene.
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