Campaign Finance Data in Real Time - NYTimes.com

Political campaigns can change every day. The Campaign Finance API now does a better job of keeping pace.

We worked with ProPublica, one of the heaviest users of the API, to make the API more real-time, and to surface more data, such as itemized contributions for every presidential candidate and ?super PAC?.

When the API was launched, most of the data it served up was updated every week or, in some cases, on a daily basis. But we work for news organizations, and what is news right now can be old news tomorrow. Committees that raise and spend money influencing federal elections are filing reports every day, not just on the day that reports are due.

The API now offers access to the details of filings within minutes after they are sent to the Federal Election Commission. We?ve also added some new responses and updated several others. But the biggest change is that users can get new information faster than ever before. Every 15 minutes, the API submits a form on the F.E.C. site listing today?s electronic filings. Previously, the fact that an electronic filing was made was the only real-time piece of information you could get. Now there?s a lot more.

Using our Fech gem, when a candidate or committee files a regular report detailing contributions and expenses, that committee?s summary information gets updated immediately in the API. When a new independent expenditure filing is sent to the F.E.C., the data from that report goes straight into the API, which means that we can update our election interactive within minutes. The API, and the latest changes to it, also help power ProPublica?s ?PAC Track? application that News Applications Developer Al Shaw developed. Al pushed some of the changes he needed to build PAC Track into the API and its Ruby wrapper, Campaign Cash ? like itemized contributions and electioneering communications.

Electioneering communications are broadcast political advertisements that identify a federal candidate and air within a certain time frame. Separate from independent expenditures, which specifically call for the election or defeat of a candidate, electioneering communications typically are the domain of non-profit organizations known as 501(c)(4)s, which do not have to reveal their donors. Three new electioneering communications responses allow users to retrieve the latest 20 communications, the latest 20 for a specific registered committee or for a specific date, much like the existing independent expenditure responses.

Both the electioneering communications and independent expenditure responses now have a ?unique_id? attribute, which is a SHA1 digest of the F.E.C.?s electronic filing number and the transaction identifier and can be used to keep duplicate records from your data. See the official documentation for more details on how unique_id works. We?ve also added ?amended_from? attributes to help you find the original filings of amended transactions. Like independent expenditures, electioneering reports are supposed to be filed electronically, not on paper, and most are. But there are some only on paper, and we?re working on ways to make sure that that information gets into the API, too.

Another new response provides summary information for individual presidential candidate filings (as opposed to overall summary information compiled from multiple filings). So if you wanted to compare a presidential candidate?s changes in money raised or spent from one report to the next, that?s now possible. Thanks to ProPublica, we?ve also added the ability to retrieve itemized contribution data for presidential candidates and Super PACs (including those active in congressional races). Check out the documentation for examples of these new responses.

In improving the API, we?ve also added to the Fech and Campaign Cash gems, and have released new versions of both on Github. We welcome contributors to those projects and your suggestions in our developers? forum.

Source: http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/27/campaign-finance-data-in-real-time/

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