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#campaign-finance-dash-dev,#campaign-finance-dash-ux, and#campaign-finance-dash-datachannels
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A lack of easy access to campaign finance data — that any citizen can search, sort and understand — undermines a transparent democracy. Our ability as voters and citizens to understand the people and corporations who fund the campaigns of our elected officials is key to making sense of policy outcomes and ensuring our elected officials have the public interest in mind when making vital decisions.
This project will put campaign finance for the General Assembly and statewide offices into an easily sortable and searchable dashboard to make sense of those who are funding campaigns of state leaders for use by citizens, journalists, activists, academics and others.
When this project is completed, the dashboard will provide both a comprehensive and — with only key search terms — granular look at a candidate’s contributors, expenses and outside independent group spending.
While this data is currently available through the N.C. State Board of Elections website, it is difficult to get answers to basic questions people might have about campaign finance here, such as: Who are this candidate’s biggest contributors? What industries give the most to North Carolina politicians? During the last election cycle, how much did a candidate spend on certain expenses, such as advertising?
See this presentation for a more detailed walk-through of the current SBE site and improvements this campaign finance Dashboard envisions.
There are three models that we can look to as instructive about the kind of dashboard we want to build. They are Illinois Sunshine, the Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP.org) and the National Institute on Money in Politics (FollowtheMoney.org).
These sites help you focus on what’s important and give you context for what it means.
Key aspects of those sites that make state campaign finance accessible:
Dynamic searching capacity. Ability to type in contributor, candidate, expense and see results across all data. Data likely combined for similar names by address or similar identifiers.
Data analysis at a glance, including: donations by industry, top contributors and expenses for each candidate, listing of ALL of a candidate’s relevant PACs and fundraising entities, listing of both candidate and outside PAC (Super PAC - see definition) spending. (See links for how those items are displayed).