Nicole Stotz Spring 2010

 The FEC provides campaign finance data online for election cycles 1976-present  Contributions totaling $200 must be reported  For the 2008 elections, who donated what, and to who?  Parsed data for San Joaquin County, and attempted to represent this on a zip code level.

 FEC individual contributions and candidate files for 2008  California ZTCA file from Census Bureau (like a zipcode, but is linked to demographic data)  San Joaquin County shapefile from CalAtlas

 FEC provides a pdf on dealing with their data  It was imported into Access, and exported as a formatted csv  Surprise, lots of errors!  Surprise, huge files!  Surprise, my computer couldn’t handle processing…20+ minutes processing times were common

 A custom dictionary replace script was the answer  No NULL values, extra commas, weird names, overpunch characters  There is no apparent use for overpunch characters, the FEC only tells how to get rid of them

 Created 3 scripts in total – to parse text files, and to join them together  Was not able to graphically represent my queries  Was able to get a subset of records of San Joaquin contributions for 2008

 While parsing the California subset individual contributions, I couldn’t find individual donations to McCain  Either all individual donations in California were under $200, and not reported  Or major committees collected these donations  Or no one in California really liked McCain enough to make a large donation  Or my data was somehow messed up (this one is most likely)