FEC Services for Financial Campaign Data Disclosure

Overview

The FEC provides two main access routes to their data:

The FEC Web Interface

This web browser-based user interface allows easy and user-friendly access to all FEC campaign committee information which has already been processed by the FEC. All individual contributions can be reached and basic filtering for fields like contributor details (name, location, occupation) is possible. The interface has several restrictions and disadvantages:
- For further offline-processing, only a limited number of 500,000 records can be downloaded for a selection.
- Raw electronic filings that have been uploaded by committees and have not yet been processed by the FEC cannot be accessed. For earmarked contributions, it can take months until availability through the web interface.
- Only a limited number of filters on the data structure is available and renders more advanced online research impossible.
- Access and comparison of multiple election cycles are bound by further restrictions.

The FEC API OpenFEC

The FEC Web Interface fetches the data from the FEC's API OpenFEC, and this API is also available to the public. At present, the API offers a state-of-the-art OpenAPI-3.0 specification and is mostly well described. Since it serves as the backend for the web interface, it does only ease the record download limit but still has restrictions and disadvantages:
- To reduce server load, API traffic is limited to 1,000 calls an hour (120 calls per minute upon request) with a result size of 100 contributions per request. Downloading contribution data to answer a specific question or as the source of a chart can require hours to days.
- Electronic filings that have not yet been processed by the FEC cannot be fully retrieved.
- Only a limited number of filters is available to download only select data.

There is a third way of access, the campaign finance bulk data – however, it covers only a part of the data (above a minimum contribution threshold) and is generally not sufficient.