We’re so glad that people have been so excited about the Federal Election Commission’s (FEC) first API. Now, there are millions of more records for you to explore! We’re looking forward to seeing what the public will build with its data.

The OpenFEC API added a filings endpoint as well as itemized receipt and disbursement data. This is the first major update to the API, but the OpenFEC API is part of a larger project that will have continual improvements and additions. The records we’re adding today are the meat and potatoes of campaign finance. You can see in detail where a campaign’s money comes from and where they spend their money.

As my fellow campaign finance geeks are well aware, the July quarterly deadline is today, and we’re introducing some new endpoints today that you might find fun to try out. But you don’t have to be a “campaign finance geek” to use the API.

If you haven’t seen it yet, Bob Lannon of the Sunlight Foundation wrote a great explainer about how to use the API. He even published an iPython notebook so you can dig into his code interactively.

Keep in mind that the API is still in beta (link removed) and not battle tested, so continue to use the data at the original FEC site for trusted figures. Please file bug reports if you find something that’s incorrect.

Here are some tips you might like to know before you grab an API key and check out the new features in the interactive documentation.

See new campaign finance documents

We now have a new filings endpoint. The current plan is to update OpenFEC data nightly. Right now, this endpoint will be an easy way to look for new filings. The filings endpoint will eventually house all reports and other documents, like “Requests for Additional Information,” that the FEC sends to filers.

Some of the most interesting data to play with is contained in “Schedules.” Today, we’re releasing Schedule A, which details contributions to campaigns, and Schedule B, which reports spending by campaigns.

Find who’s giving to campaigns using Schedule A data

Our release of an endpoint for Schedule A (/schedules/schedule_a) enables one of the most requested features — looking for contributions by contributor name.

Schedule A contains interesting details that describe itemized money that comes into a campaign.

Two things that tend to confuse people are “memoed” contributions and “unitemized” contributions. Memoed contributions provide more details about a previously reported item, so you don’t want to include memoed items in totals. Campaigns aren't required to report individual contributors who give $200 or less in the Schedule A section of the forms, but the total of those small donations are reported as “unitemized contributions” on the summary section of the form.

Aside from the raw data, we’ve also created some subtotals that will be great shortcuts for people interested in doing data visualization.

Would you like to visualize money flowing between different FEC filters?

See the breakdown of contributions that came from other committees using this endpoint: /schedules/schedule_a/by_contributor

Also, keep in mind that the data reflects the paperwork coming into the FEC, so if key information like the FEC ID of a committee contribution is missing, the data will under-represent contributions that belong to that committee.

Would you like to compare how much money is coming from differently sized contributions?

The /schedules/schedule_a/by_size endpoint aggregates Schedule A donations based on size:

  • $200 and under
  • $200.01 - $499
  • $500 - $999
  • $1000 - $1999
  • $2000 +

In cases where the donations are $200 or less, the results include small donations that are reported on Schedule A, but filers are not required to itemize those small donations, so we also add unitemized contributions. Unitemized contributions come from the summary section of the forms. It represents the total money brought in from donors that are not reported on Schedule A and have given $200 or less.

Perhaps you want to find where a campaign’s contributions are coming from by state?

Pick a committee ID and the /schedules/schedule_a/by_state endpoint will give you the totals reported by state for that committee.

Use Schedule B to see where campaigns spend money

Our FEC data sherpas (in other words, the people who have been climbing this mountain all along and don’t get enough credit) Paul Clark and Jeff Chumley, released itemized disbursement data last February, which allows you to view where all this campaign money is going. Now, this information is also available via the API.

This provides yet another opportunity for data visualization.

Schedule B provides the details of where campaigns spend money. You can filter by many values, including amount and name of the entity receiving the money, by using the /sechedule/schedule_b endpoint.

Pagination and count

We’re working with large datasets, so there are some trade-offs between performance and features. One of those trade-offs is that we’re using approximate count for the larger data sets. For example, we’re using 45 million Schedule A records. We can return your subset of records in a timely manner, but it would take several minutes to get the exact count, since the database counts them one at a time. Instead, Josh Carp discovered a wonderful hack that uses postgres’ EXPLAIN function to get an approximate count quickly. We use approximate counts for large result sets and revert to exact counts for smaller queries.

On the behemoth data sets, pagination is a bit less straightforward. You can sort a variety of ways, but you need to supply indexes to get to the next page. Again, this is to make the endpoint perform better. Managing random offsets on a data set of this size would take a very long time per request.

Due to the large quantity of Schedule A and Schedule B records, these endpoints are not paginated by page number. Instead, you can request the next page of results by adding the values in the last_indexes object from pagination to the URL of your last request. For example, when sorting by contributor_receipt_date, on the schedule_a endpoint, you might receive a page of results with the following pagination information:

json
{
  "pagination": {
    "pages": 2152643,
    "per_page": 20,
    "count": 43052850,
    "last_indexes": {
        "last_index": 230880619,
        "last_contributor_receipt_date": "2014-01-01"
    }
  }
}

To fetch the next page of results, append last_index=230880619&last_contributor_receipt_date=2014-01-01 to the URL.

Our goal is to display as much data as possible. For the bulk of candidate and committee information, we’re displaying data starting with the 1980 cycle. For performance and expense reasons, we are limiting Schedule A and B data to the last four years. If you need older data, it is still available in the FEC’s extensive bulk data offerings.

If you make something with the FEC API, be sure to share your creations with us on Twitter. We would like to highlight some of your great work.