30 day Campaign Finance reports for the 9/11 primary were due yesterday — 8/14/2012 — to the Department of Elections. Looking over finance reports is a good deal of fun and you can judge something about campaigns by the amount of money raised and *who* they raise it from. If you want to start perusing some reports, take a look:
You can find reports filed with the DOE here.
If you are looking for a candidate, hit the Candidate Committee button, then type in the last name of the candidate plus 2012 in both year boxes. For this example I am typing in Short, 2012, 2012. Then hit Search.
The next page (I ended up with Danny Short’s report when I wrote this post last night, you may have a second step of choosing the report you want to see.) will be a list of contributions and expenditures. We hate this list. Scroll down to the Generate Images button and hit that.
NOW, you are on the page that shows the pdf of the complete report submitted. You can save this to your drive, print it or just look through it. Danny Short’s report is fairly boring, but it was a good example.
Even though the due date was yesterday, reports will continue to straggle in for some days. If you don’t see the report for the candidate you were looking for, check back later. It will get there.
Not sure why you have to go through these steps to see the image of the report. If I were in charge, this would be less work and have a better search function. Anyway, start looking at those reports and use this thread to discuss what you find.