The 8 Day Campaign Finance reports were due in to the Department of Elections on 5 September, covering the period from 8/13 through 9/3 for all candidates. Want to take a look? Following the money is always fun and sometimes instructive. We posted up a thread for folks taking a look at the 30 day reports, and here is your chance to post up what you find for candidates AND their PACs.
Here are the directions to access the reports again:
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.
EDIT: Commenter puck provides instructions to download this data as a spreadsheet:
You can also save a spreadsheet of the report. Using the Short 2012 example above:
Right next to the Generate Images button is a Generate CSV button. Click that.
CSV means Comma Separated Values. A CSV file is a text file of data with commas separating the columns. It can be opened by Excel or other spreadsheet software. If you open it with a regular text editor like Notepad, you will see all the commas.
When you click Generate CSV, it will create a file called “Candidate” and ask you where you want to save it. Rename the file to something meaningful, like “Short2012.csv” It’s important to give it the .CSV extension so your computer will know to open it with Excel.
Then you can just double-click “Short2012.csv” to open the spreadsheet. You can then save it in regular Excel format, i.e. “Short2012.xls”
Even though the due date was Wednesday, reports will continue to straggle in for some days. Plus these reports are manually posted by DOE staff, and that is not instantaneous. If you don’t see the report for the candidate you were looking for, check back later. It will get there.
As of yesterday there were 30 day reports still MISSING from some candidates, including Trippi Congo, Richard L. Dyton, Sherry Dorsey-Walker, Tyler Brooks — according to an informant. These are all city candidates, so there may be others missing too. Not sure what is going on with these candidates, but these reports are a PITA to all campaigns and it’s not quite fair that these are hanging out this far out. Now, it is also possible that we are victims of the crazy search system at the DOE website too.
Not sure why you have to go through these steps to see the image of the report. If I were in charge, I would hire LG to make this cleaner and less work and maybe add some Simpsons’-themed pieces of flair. Anyway, start looking at those reports and use this thread to discuss what you find.