How the file is built.

Sources

Every figure comes from a filing made with the Federal Election Commission or from a result certified by a state election office, and links back to it. The filings used are the itemized receipts committees report on Schedule A, the independent expenditures they report on Schedule E, committee-to-candidate contributions, and the Form 1 statement in which a committee discloses the organization connected to it. Amendments are resolved so that a superseded filing never counts twice. No scraped, leaked or purchased data enters the file.

What a row is

The unit is a position: one committee's money for or against one candidate in one election. Support and opposition are never netted against each other. A donor's record is the set of positions taken by the committees that reported receiving that donor's money, and it is labelled as derived, because a committee's donors did not choose which races it entered. A position is scored only when its race has a result. Until then it is pending, and pending is shown as pending.

Attribution

Three kinds of statement appear in the file and they are never merged. A disclosure is what a committee itself reported, such as the organization it named as connected on Form 1. An official record is what a government registry holds. An inference is ours, such as matching two filings to the same person, and it is labelled as ours. Where the trail ends, at a company whose owners appear on no public record or at a nonprofit that does not disclose its donors, the file says that disclosure ends there. It does not guess, and it does not call anyone a front or a shell.

Identity

An organization is identified by the identifiers it files under. A person is matched across filings only when more than a name agrees, and the largest donors are matched by hand with the evidence cited. A person is shown by first name, last name and country, and by the date and amount of each filing line. Address, employer and occupation are never shown, and no profile is assembled for anyone below the reviewed threshold.

Results

Certified results outrank provisional ones, always. A provisional result is labelled until the state certifies it, and the certified result replaces it visibly, with the date.

What is never claimed

That money caused a result. The file shows which money sat beside which outcome and stops there. Nothing in it is a financial return, a market or advice; the words win and loss describe elections, not investments. Nothing in it says that an organization controls a committee unless the committee disclosed exactly that.

Terms

Free, permanently. No subscription, no advertising, no sale of data. The contributor records in the file are never used to contact anyone, for any purpose. The launch mailing list is a separate opt-in list that is deleted after the launch message is sent.

Corrections

Every figure links to its filing, so any reader can check it. Errors reported to hello@donoralpha.com are corrected in the file, and the correction is dated. Back to the front.