During election years, candidates for federal office and political action committees file frequent reports detailing who they have given money to and received money from. These reports, aggregated with the Federal Election Commission (FEC), are supposed to create transparency about flows of influence in the American political system, but the FEC system for providing these reports actually can make important information obscure.
For example, let’s say I wanted to look up campaign contributions made by AT&T during the month of June 2008, when the House and Senate deliberated on the FISA Amendments Act that gave AT&T retroactive immunity for breaking the law when it violated millions of customers’ privacy rights. Let’s say I wanted to know whether there was a correlation between politicians voting for the FISA Amendments Act and politicians receiving money from AT&T.
I could do what makes literal sense, visiting the Committee Search page and type “AT&T” into the search box. Unfortunately, the results don’t include contributions for June of 2008, even though the reports for June have already been filed by AT&T. Trying to get around that, I could go to the page to search for the “images” of AT&T’s filed record. The reports for June (filed as the “July report”) are indeed available upon a search there — but in the form of a pdf file, a graphic pdf file that looks like this:
In this image, I see that two Democratic members of Congress who voted for the FISA Amendments Act, Rep. Nancy Boyda and Rep. Tim Holden, also received money from AT&T during the month when the vote occurred. That’s two pieces of useful information. But they’re needles in a gigantic haystack: a pdf file that is 181 pages long! But it’s almost illegible in the quality of the text — can you tell what numbers are sixes and what numbers are eights? Also, because this information is made available in graphic form, users cannot search for numbers or names. You want particular information? You have to read all 181 pages! That’s not a recipe for government transparency; it’s a way for financial transactions to be publicly hidden.
It’s a bit crazy that reports are made available as these crude, blocky graphic images. After all, the vast majority of reports to the FEC these days are made electronically. They should be electronically converted to some searchable and malleable format, shouldn’t they? The FEC has given electronic disclosure the old college try, but hasn’t quite succeeded. If I try to get the June 2008 electronic file by visiting the Electronic Filing Report Retrieval page, I can’t get results for AT&T because the search software refuses to accept odd characters like the ampersand.
Yeesh! What a mess.
Fortunately, there is a way around all this, a way to get recent FEC reports on campaign contributions in electronic format. You have to noodle around a bit, but here’s how.
1. Visit the Report Image Search Page, and type in the name of the PAC or candidate you’re interested in. (For some reason, on this page weird characters like ampersands are OK). Hit the button that reads “Get Listing.”
2. Look at the results page up near the top for the PAC or candidate you’re interested in. Find the column that says “Com. ID.” Does the committee id listed underneath it start with a “C”? Then you’re in luck. Copy the committee id, visit the Electronic Filing Report Retrieval Page, and paste the committee id into the “Committee ID” space in the form on that page. Hit the button that says “Send Query,” and you’ll get a page chock full of reports.
If the committee id listed underneath does NOT start with a “C,” but rather with a “S” or an “H” or some other letter, click the link on that committee id, and you’ll be taken to a page that has another committee id, one that does begin with a “C.” Copy that committee id, visit the Electronic Filing Report Retrieval Page, and paste the committee id into the “Committee ID” space in the form on that page. Hit the button that says “Send Query,” and you’ll get a page chock full of reports.
3. On these pages chock full of reports, you’ll see a link for each periodic report that says “Download.” Click the “Download” link for the period of interest to you. You’ll be given the option to download the report as a .csv file. Pick the .csv file option. CSV is comma-delimited file format that can be read by Microsoft Excel and all sorts of other spreadsheet programs. (A “delimiter” is a character that tells the computer that one cell in a spreadsheet is finished and that the next cell is beginning.) Save the file to disk.
4. Let’s assume you have Microsoft Excel, since that’s the most common spreadsheet program around. (Importing should be the same for most other spreadsheet programs). I’ll be giving instructions based on Microsoft Excel 2003, since that’s the program I’ve got handy.
Now, if the file downloaded actually ended in .csv, then Microsoft Excel 2003 would open it right up. Peskily, the file would open right up. But for some reason, the FEC saves the files with a .fec ending, which Microsoft doesn’t directly recognize. Here’s what to do:
1. Open Microsoft Excel 2003.
2. Go to File –> Open. In the box to open files, be sure to select the option “All Files.” Then find the folder with your .fec file, select it, and click “Open.”
3. A Text Import Wizard will open up. Choose the “delimited” file type, and hit “Next.”
4. Under the available delimiters, select “comma” and hit “Finish.”
Bingo! Now you’ve got all the FEC data in the report. Each row is a specific incident (also called a “case”). Each column is a piece of information about that incident. Now you can use all the tools a spreadsheet has, including selecting, sorting and summing, to do a quick search for information and a quick analysis of very recent campaign contributions.
Keep in mind that these reports contain three kinds of information appearing in this order: contributions TO the committee, then contributions FROM the committee to other committees or candidates, and finally expenditures for things like internet access, office space, and occasionally other meaty reportable bits. Be sure you know which sort of incident you’re looking at.
Looking at this spreadsheet file, I can very quickly tell you that the contributions to Nancy Boyda and Tim Holden I referred to earlier were the only ones made by AT&T in June of 2008. Rep. Tim Mahoney, on the other hand, received three contributions. He’s another Democrat who voted for the FISA Amendements Act. And later today, with a sort or two, I’ll be able to tell you on average how much money the congressfolks who voted for the FISA Amendments Act received from AT&T, then compare that to the average amount of money received from AT&T by the congressfolks who voted against the FISA Amendments Act. It’s the kind of information that would have taken me days to compile with the those nasty bulky graphic reports.
