The Best Government that Money Can Buy

There’s a ton of money flowing through our elections, and every transaction represents a relationship. The FEC is saddled with the responsibility of processing and publishing the disclosure of over $10 billion in campaign finance activity every election. That figure rises every election cycle thanks to a Supreme Court decision from 2010 that lifted the limits on campaign finance contributions.

In 2012 the FEC’s disclosure system wasn’t capable of handling the colossal flood of paperwork filed by the historic Obama campaign. The system crashed after the campaign’s first quarterly filing. Today more than 300,000 American vendors and 5.9 million donors are connected to the campaign finance apparatus in one way or another.

Dark money, soft money, hard money, digital money, funny money, grassroots donations, direct mail vendors, campaign rally costs, and yes, even Facebook ad buys are hiding in plain sight buried within FEC filings.

Many politicos are shocked to learn that much of the data that the FEC publishes tends to be inaccurate. Surprisingly, the public data set lacks formatting standards (limiting the ability to automate analysis). It’s also crippled by an API that makes bulk data requests nearly impossible.

When media organizations and political committees are relying on the FEC as a primary source of information, they are making decisions based on bad data.

That misinformed decision making creates a misinformed electorate. Races are won, policy is created, lives are changed forever based on information published by the commission.

In today’s landscape the stakes could not be higher. These are massive technical problems that are having an increasingly significant impact on the country. More money in elections means more data, more math, and wider margins for error.

We’ve entered the modern political economy. It’s time the players start seeking a modern method for keeping pace. This is the first story in a series about our political economy, the money that moves through it, and the players involved. Tomorrow I’ll share a simple solution that everyone can use to have a closer look at how campaign finance is shaping our country. Stay tuned.

#politicaleconomy — Circa Victor