Why are some contributions attributed only to “Individual”?

Although the FEC publishes detailed information about anyone who contributes to political candidates or campaigns, the goal of this project is not to draw attention to the many everyday people who choose to make small contributions to support their favored causes or candidates. For those who don’t appear to be executives or senior-level employees at these companies, I have redacted identifying information.

Why are some political advertisements missing?

Although the FEC tracks ad spending, they do not maintain a database of the advertisements themselves. I am doing my best to gather this information as I am able, but databases with this information are either limited or prohibitively expensive. If you’re aware of an advertisement that’s missing, please send it in so I can add it!

What’s going on with the list of PACs? Why aren’t the amounts belonging to each PAC displayed?

There are some errors in FEC data, generally where in-kind cryptocurrency contributions have been double-reported or even triple-reported. While the FEC accounts for this by recording a disbursement for each duplicate contribution, it causes the receipts data to appear artificially high. Because I am only calculating committee receipts (accounting for duplicates) for the cryptocurrency-related PACs, and it is not feasible for me to do this type of labor-intensive data correction across all political committees, I am showing the order of PACs as reflected by the FEC, while acknowledging that PACs with cryptocurrency-denominated contributions may appear slightly too highly. To avoid propogating numbers that I know are inaccurate, I no longer show the FEC-reported PAC receipts in the lists of PACs.

Why do some numbers not seem to add up?

You might notice that there are some discrepancies between numbers — for example, committees that appear to have spent more than they’ve raised, or cash on hand that doesn’t equal receipts - disbursements. This is largely due to the fact that different data is subject to different reporting requirements and timeframes. For example, the FEC requires that committees report independent expenditures within 24 or 48 hours of the expenditure, but receipts are reported monthly or quarterly. This site aims to show the most up-to-date data as possible, at the expense of occasionally unusual numbers.

Why does it look like there hasn’t been much recent spending activity?

There are delays between when expenditures are made and when they are filed with the FEC. This project attempts to pull as much as possible from 24- and 48-hour reports, but some data just isn’t filed that frequently.

Are these people and companies donating cryptocurrency or regular dollars?

It’s a mix, but anecdotally it appears to be mostly dollars.

Does this project use blockchain data?

No, the monetary data for this project comes from reports to the FEC (which includes donations made both in dollars and in cryptocurrency). This project does not aim to track dark money political spending that is not reported to the FEC.

Who cares what the cryptocurrency industry is doing when [oil|pharma|banking|some other industry] also spends millions on lobbying and politics?

I do! As a crypto industry researcher, this is something I pay a lot of attention to. However, I also think the magnitude of spending warrants scrutiny from a much broader audience.

I firmly agree that corporate influence on politics is a much broader issue than just in the cryptocurrency industry. The broader problem isCitizens United and the ability for corporations and the super wealthy to pour this much money into politics. If you would like to see a project like this to track spending from another industry, please make it happen! As always, my code is all open source.