The first RESTful API for the Federal Election Commission. We're aiming to make campaign finance more accessible for journalists, academics, developers, and other transparency seekers.
are a start to me understanding candidate_id, but I think there is some info encoded in there that I don't understand.
For example given candidate ID:
H0AL02087
H = House
0 = ?????
AL = Alabama
02 = 2nd District
087 = 87th candidate, a unique ID
What does the 2nd number mean? It seems to almost always be a 0, 2, 4, or 6 (if it's not one of these then I'm interpreting it as messy data). For instance here are the value counts for a sample of data I pulled:
0 8587
2 7505
8 5847
6 5524
4 3699
1 5
7 3
3 2
5 1
9 1
Does this second number have something to do with the election year? They seem to be somewhat correlated with the last digit of the year, eg 0 most often occurs in 2010 and 2020, though 0 also appears in other years as well. Same with 2, it most often appears in 2012 and 2022, but in other years as well.
NickCrews
commented
1 year ago
Hi there!
The docs explaining candidate_id: https://github.com/fecgov/openFEC/blob/09808c10f25aae3efa352b574c64ad2103a6ac88/webservices/docs.py#L67-L70
are a start to me understanding candidate_id, but I think there is some info encoded in there that I don't understand.
For example given candidate ID: H0AL02087 H = House 0 = ????? AL = Alabama 02 = 2nd District 087 = 87th candidate, a unique ID
What does the 2nd number mean? It seems to almost always be a 0, 2, 4, or 6 (if it's not one of these then I'm interpreting it as messy data). For instance here are the value counts for a sample of data I pulled: 0 8587 2 7505 8 5847 6 5524 4 3699 1 5 7 3 3 2 5 1 9 1
Does this second number have something to do with the election year? They seem to be somewhat correlated with the last digit of the year, eg
0most often occurs in 2010 and 2020, though0also appears in other years as well. Same with2, it most often appears in 2012 and 2022, but in other years as well.Thank you for the assistance!