Electronic disclosure of campaign contributions and expenditures is an extraordinarily important innovation. Online electronic disclosure enables reporters, academics and others to obtain campaign finance information quickly and accurately, often well before elections. It is helping to make our nation’s campaign system transparent with more public accountability than at any other time in our history.
The Center for Governmental Studies’ National Campaign Finance Portal Project seeks to achieve the pinnacle of campaign finance disclosure—allowing researchers, instantly and simultaneously, to track all contributions from individuals, PACs or corporate contributors online, across multiple federal, state and local jurisdictions.
CGS has successfully built a working prototype with data from 2001-2002 from Los Angeles and San Francisco to demonstrate a new technique to search electronically through otherwise incompatible and conflicting databases and assemble a first-ever coherent picture of campaign contribution patterns across multiple jurisdictions.
