Campaign contribution methodology

NOTE: We currently have campaign contributions through October 7, 2007.

Pegasus News has created a database for political contributions made to elected officials for every jurisdiction within its coverage area.  This database will make all itemized contributions received by current elected officials over the last couple of years easily accessible to our readers.  The database will also allow interested parties to determine all contributions made by each individual donor throughout the DFW area.

Through open records requests, we obtained copies of all campaign finance reports filed by current office holders for every city and town council, ISD board of trustees, and county commissioners court in Collin, Dallas, Denton, Rockwall and Tarrant Counties since January 2005.  We then entered each itemized contribution by hand into one comprehensive database for the entire DFW area. 

Pegasus logged each individual contribution the Texas Ethics Commission forms which each candidate and office holder must file on a regular basis. Contributions are listed in Schedule A (“Political Contributions Other Than Pledges Or Loans”) of each Candidate/Officeholder Campaign Finance Report filed since January 2005.

Legibility

When reviewing the data, we discovered a much wider range of legibility for handwriting than we anticipated.  Though a majority of elected officials typed their contribution information, or at the very least took the time to hand-write the information legibly, a not-insignificant number of elected officials and candidates filled out the forms with handwriting that was difficult, if not entirely impossible, to decipher.  We did our best to interpret each entry as accurately as possible, but at times deciphering with confidence proved to be impossible.  In these rare cases, we recorded the entry as “illegible.”

Unknown addresses

Readers will discover a number of entries for which the contributor’s address is listed as unknown.  In many cases, given the completeness of the other entries on a particular Schedule A, the best guess would be that the elected official meant to record an address but discovered too late that that particular information was missing for a specific donation.  However, a handful of elected officials continuously neglected to record the addresses of their contributors, and by doing so they are keeping their constituents from knowing the extent to which they receive out-of-jurisdiction contributions.

Officials with no contributions

Many elected officials will show no itemized contributions received.  There are three possible reasons why no contributions appear:

The most likely explanation is simply that the candidate had no contributions to report.  This is most common in smaller jurisdictions, in jurisdictions in which no contested elections have been held, and for office holders who have not run for reelection since 2004 (or, rarely, prior to 2004) and thus have not raised money since.  Another explanation is that the candidate received a minimal amount of contributions but spent so little (less than $500) that preparing an itemized Schedule A was not required by law.  Finally, in a few cases, we have not yet received a response from the elected official’s jurisdiction.  All of these remaining jurisdictions are small in size, and given the trends observed in comparable jurisdictions, it is doubtful that any current elected official in these jurisdictions have received any contributions.  Nevertheless, if we receive reports from any of these jurisdictions that show itemized contributions, they will be added as promptly as possible.

Design

The most likely place a reader will encounter contributions on the site is on the page dedicated to each individual office holder.  The reader will notice that for each contribution the name of the contributor as well as the address from which the contribution was made are clickable.  Clicking on the contributor’s name will take the reader to a page with every contribution made by that contributor to all elected officials within the Pegasus coverage area since January 2005, while clicking on the address will show all contributions made from that address during the same time frame.

Having the opportunity to see all donations made by any individual contributor is perhaps the most important feature of this database.  Readers will discover many contributors, both individuals and businesses, who have donated to multiple candidates and office holders in multiple jurisdictions.  Though all of these records are publicly available, no one else, to the best of our knowledge, has made it so simple to determine the extent to which contributors have given to officials in multiple jurisdictions.  Without this database, anyone interested in determining all the jurisdictions in which Contributor X has donated would have to make countless open records requests, and very few people have the time or resources to do so.

In addition to sorting by donor, readers should take note of the ability to sort by address.  Contributors can and are listed by multiple variations of their names, and since we do not know which variation of the name is correct, or whether they are for one or multiple people, we went with the name as listed (though we corrected obvious misspellings, and names of businesses and political action committees [PACs] were conformed with one another to the extent practical).  Thus, contributors named “John Doe,” “John A. Doe,” “John Doe, Jr.,” “Mr. & Mrs. John Doe,” and “John and Jane Doe” are listed as separate contributors even if all of those contributors made their donations from the same address.  Though listed separately, common sense does dictate that all of those contributions, if coming from the same address, are made by the same person, or at least by closely-related people, and having the ability to sort by address allows a reader to see all of John Doe’s contributions, no matter how many version of his name were reported.  If a donor makes donations from multiple addresses (a home address, a work address and a PO Box are the most likely variations), each address will be listed separately on that donor’s page.

We did work to make addresses conform with one another, so that there would not be separate listings for “123 Main,” “123 Main Street,” and “123 North Main Street” when obvious that all were indicating the same physical location in the same city and zip code.  We also attempted to make street addresses correspond with their actual city.  This is important primarily for donations made from the 75205 and 75225 zip codes, as virtually all 75205 and 75225 residents list their home city as “Dallas” when in reality it is more likely to be Highland Park or University Park.  This is not just an attempt to be technically correct, since being precise with the home city can help determine the extent to which, for example, Dallas City Council members received contributions from non-Dallas residents.

There are a few office addresses that have numerous unrelated contributions, but those are generally easy to distinguish by business name.

One problem that a reader might anticipate with this design is that, if there are multiple John Does, all of their donations will appear on one “John Doe” page.  Reviewing the data, this problem is very rare, and a reader should be able to determine that a John Doe on 123 Main Street in Benbrook donating to a Benbrook City Council member is probably a different John Doe than the one who resides on 345 State Street in Rockwall donating to a Rockwall ISD School Board trustee.

In-kind donations

In-kind donations (services and products provided in lieu of cash) are included in our database. Although we do not yet have a way to denote those, we intend to do so in the near future. However, it is safe to assume that the overwhelming majority of contributions that have odd amounts of change in them (i.e.: $378.64) are in-kind donations.

Coming soon

The database will soon expand to include contributions made to local judges and district attorneys as well as to state representatives and senators and U.S. representatives from the DFW area.