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Subscribe to RSSThe Federal Election Commission has begun making campaign finance reports more readily available, immediately making the lives of political reporters and data junkies a thousand times easier.
With little fanfare, the FEC has started making individual filings publicly available as a Real Simple Syndication feed, instantaneously available in any RSS system, such as Google Reader. The Sunlight Foundation, a Washington nonprofit that advocates for open government, reported the development last week.
Technically speaking, FEC databases have long been public, but getting them has been a mind-numbing process. On the 20th of each month, the commission posts a large text file — sometimes approaching half a gigabyte — for every campaign finance filing over the previous month. Organizations that wanted to manipulate the data had to use special database tools to extract it, and it then had to be read by a real person for sorting into appropriate reporting categories.
Some of those hurdles remain — the reports are still in the .FEC file format and are still most easily accessed using the commission's downloadable command-line tool. But at least they now come to you directly and are easily browsable.
Super PACS: Follow the money — if you can
The Sunlight Foundation — which pushed for an RSS feed at an FEC meeting this year — called the development "a modest step" but one that was important "because it acknowledges that time-sensitive data needs to be presented in a convenient machine readable format."
If you want to try it for yourself, you can access the new RSS here.
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This should make it easier to see which special interests are putting money into both parties. I just hope this makes people stop and think before blindly voting along party lines. All people have to do is just research before they vote for a canidate, but some dont want to and just want to sling barbs at the other person without even the slightest iota of information on the opponent. People need to stop being arrogant and thinking that their canidate is invincible.
I want to know to the penny what our government gives to each politician to operate on they have all these free-b's , their pay and benefits are outrageous, but I want to know how much, all they get from us to operate their offices on. I want to know every penny they recieve from each person, pac, super pac, I want every last one of these contributors names put out in public for us all to see. I have to fill out a report when I contribute over two hundred dollars to any politician, so lets get the same from every last contributor. These special interest groups hide while they enfluence the outcome of our elections and we need to put a stop to their sorry low life games they are running on the working class in this country.