palewire / django-calaccess-campaign-browser

A Django app to refine, review and republish campaign finance data drawn from the California Secretary of State’s CAL-ACCESS database
http://django-calaccess-campaign-browser.californiacivicdata.org
MIT License
17 stars 12 forks source link

What do we with independent expenditures? #199

Open aboutaaron opened 9 years ago

aboutaaron commented 9 years ago

Form 496 holds independent expenditures (not to be confused with expenditures recorded in the ExpnCd table).

From CAL-Access:

An “independent expenditure” is an expenditure made in connection with a communication (e.g., a billboard, advertisement, mailing) that expressly advocates the nomination, election, or defeat of a clearly identified candidate or the qualification, passage, or defeat of a clearly identified measure. An independent expenditure is a payment that is not made to—or at the behest of—the affected candidate or committee.

Source: Form 496 docs [PDF]

While this table is loaded in the raw data parser, we do not do any kind of analysis or extrapolation on the browser side. We should consider what to do with this table.

mhkeller commented 9 years ago

+1 to avoid this madness https://twitter.com/mhkeller/status/628313024139558912/photo/1