Good tool to follow campaign contributions

Posted at 9:02 AM on September 6, 2007 by Mike Mulcahy (3 Comments)

I was looking at the FEC Web site today and found they have followed the New York Times lead and created maps of presidential campaign contributions. Check out the Minnesota map. Wouldn't it be great to have the same kind of gizmo to track contributions for state and local offices?

Comments (3)

We could have a tool that did it but the state ethics board doesn't keep the data in a way that would allow even an outside source to easily put it together.

Perhaps the new director, when chosen, will put some time into the technology of Minnesota campaign finance.

All they would need to do is instead of or in addition to creating the pdf documents, supply a csv file of the data and someone (outside of the state ethics commission) could build a sorting tool.

Posted by Brian Hanf | September 6, 2007 10:37 AM

Pft. You make it sound so easy Brian. You could do that... _OR_ break out the old pencil, pad of paper and do the math yourself. Heck... I think those calculator things might come in handy too!

Posted by gml4 | September 6, 2007 10:53 AM

Currently, only contributions from individuals over $100 must be reported as separate line items, and could be tracked by zip code. In fact, legislative candidates like myself often receive a large portion, if not a majority, of our donations from small donors, in amounts $50 or less.

Minnesota's Political Contribution Rebate Program is a nation-leading model for allowing ordinary citizens (that is, those of us who are not independently wealthy) to be able to afford to run for office. There are some tweaks that we should make, but the fact that teachers, mechanics, nurses, bums - heck, even me! - can get run for a legislative seat is part of our prairie populist tradition. The rebate program makes legislators (in general) beholden to our thousands of neighbors and not to large donors or PACs. The increasing influence of legislative caucuses in campaigns and independent expenditures has no doubt altered the campaign finance landscape, but by and large candidate campaigns are financed by the small donations.

These $50 contributions would make it very difficult to track by zip code, and requiring every single contribution to be tracked this way might prove to be far more expensive than the information we might glean from the effort.

I do not mean to discount by any means the transparency one could gain from tracking such information. For instance, did you know that the Pohlad family contributed 233,950 to state committees - on both sides of the aisle - from 2000 to 2005?

Posted by Jeremy Kalin | September 6, 2007 4:22 PM

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