I did the political equivalent of Googling myself yesterday: I tried to look up my donations on OpenSecrets.org (the Center for Responsive Politics site), and found to my surprise the following "results":
records found in 0.165 seconds.
Total for this search: $0
No records found
Follow the money mystery after the jump...
Puzzled, I tried to figure out what had happened, got impatient after 0.753334 seconds, and just emailed the webmaster for OpenSecrets:
I was curious and decided to check the OpenSecrets website for my own donations and discovered that I was not listed in the donor database. (I've given several times to Senator Obama's campaign.)
Can you explain why I'm not listed?
The answer to me from Massie Ritsch, CPR's Communications Director:
Generally, only contributors who have donated more than $200 are listed in the FEC's "master file," which is where the data on individual donors comes from. But if you've given enough small donations to total more than $200, then you should be in that file. May I ask how much money you have contributed to Sen. Obama's presidential campaign?
Well, I'll admit that I haven't kept track, because I'd assumed I'd never get close to the maximum... I could check my credit-card records, but ... okay, embarrassment time.
But there's an important point here: the public FEC database is incomplete. This affects all sorts of analyses conducted using the FEC database, from broad generalizations about "who gives" to microtargeting.
Update: Ritsch notes the SEC/FEC typos (now corrected) and adds...
OpenSecrets.org's Donor Lookup does explain the limitations of the data, as we do in many other places on the site "This database includes Federal Election Commission records of receipts from all individuals who contribute at least $200 (smaller contributions are not part of the public record)," as does the search limited to donors to presidential candidates: "This database includes Federal Election Commission records of receipts from all individuals who contribute more than $200 (smaller contributions are typically not part of the public record)."
And on pages where we aggregate contributions by industry or geography, you'll see a note like this:
"METHODOLOGY: The totals on these charts are calculated from PAC contributions and contributions from individuals giving more than $200, as reported to the Federal Election Commission. Individual contributions are generally categorized based on the donor's occupation/employer, although individuals may be classified instead as ideological donors if they've given more than $200 to an ideological PAC."
Small donors are included in the campaign's summary information - total raised, spent, cash on hand, etc. But in our deeper analysis, which requires a donor's employer/occupation and address, we must exclude small donors, because the FEC does not provide data on them.
So to be fair to CPR, I went back to the site and checked the main page and various search pages. What I found:
BUT...
Large websites are like cathedrals, always works in progress. On the other hand, I think there needs to be a bit more mortar noting the SEC database limits...