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opencivicdata / docs.opencivicdata.org

Open Civic Data project documentation
https://open-civic-data.readthedocs.io
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Campaign Finance Filing: Do same treatment as sender/recipient to Filing.actions.agent #74

Open jpmckinney opened 7 years ago

jpmckinney commented 7 years ago

@aepton

Also, is Filing.filer guaranteed to be a Committee?

aepton commented 7 years ago

I...think so? I haven't seen an instance yet where a non-committee files. I suppose it's theoretically possible.

jsfenfen commented 7 years ago

At the U.S. Federal level, notices of independent expenditures (uncoordinated spending by third parties) are filed by any entity that makes one (this could include state-level pacs [edit: ok, I'm not positive about this, but I've seen federal spending in state races!], unions, social welfare non-profits (c)(4)'s, business leagues (US Chamber of Commerce) (c)(6). That has historically included individuals and, very rarely, corporations. (There are also "communication cost" filings for organizations that promote politicians to their membership--I think NRA spends 7 figures on this). If I had to bet, I'd say that states that oppose independent spending will lose in court...

aepton commented 7 years ago

Hm. In my experience, when unions, Chambers of Commerce and other groups spend money in races, they do so via committees they set up for that purpose. I guess it's not surprising to learn that that's not universally the case.

That means we could allow the Filer to be some other kind of type, but I wonder if maybe it's worth it to force every Filer to be a Committee, and to use the committee_type to indicate that "this is actually a person/corporation/whatever". A Committee's really just an OCD Organization, which is defined as "a group of people" - I don't see why the size of that group couldn't be 1 (in the case of individuals filing) or why a corporation/union/etc couldn't be an Organization.

We could maybe add a boolean flag for is_registered_committee to the Committee model, to indicate whether the Committee is really a committee or just, say, a dudette who filed a form. But that raises the question of "where/with whom did this entity register to become a committee?" And it seems plausible that what counts as a registered committee in one jurisdiction is totally different from another one. So maybe just using the committee_type field for this makes sense.