For Journalists

The Data Is Public. The Story
Shouldn't Take Days to Find.

BallotBase turns raw FEC and state campaign finance filings into searchable, readable intelligence. Find donor patterns, track outside spending, and surface contradictions between what candidates say and who funds them, on deadline.

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Does This Sound Familiar?

The FEC database has everything. Getting to it is the problem.

FEC data is public but painful
The filings are there. The data is technically accessible. But navigating raw FEC exports, cross-referencing committee IDs, and making sense of Schedule A records takes hours of work that most reporters don't have on a breaking news timeline. By the time you've pulled it together, the story has moved.
IE spending is scattered across dozens of filings
Independent expenditure activity tells some of the most important stories in a race. But it's spread across multiple committee filings, updated on inconsistent schedules, and nearly impossible to aggregate quickly. Most coverage skips it entirely because it's too hard to pull on deadline.
Donor pattern stories require cross-referencing you can't do manually
The Chevron donor showing up in two climate candidates' filings. The real estate developer maxed out to a housing affordability champion. These stories exist in the data. Finding them manually across hundreds of filings isn't realistic.
What BallotBase Does

Fast access to the data behind the story.

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Search the Full Donor Database
BallotBase has ingested FEC Schedule A individual contribution data across multiple cycles. Search any donor by name, employer, occupation, ZIP code, or contribution amount. Cross-reference donors across multiple races and committees. Find the pattern stories that live inside the data without spending a day in spreadsheets.
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Platform vs. Money, Automatically
BallotBase scrapes candidate websites for actual policy language and compares it against their observed donor patterns. When a candidate's financial relationships don't match their platform, BallotBase flags it. Data vs. data, not opinion. Every finding is cited to a committee ID and report type.
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Outside Spending, All in One Place
Track every independent expenditure active in a race. Which organizations are spending, for or against which candidate, how much, when, and in what format. IE activity mapped across the full campaign timeline and updated each filing cycle.
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Full Financial Picture of Any Committee
Pull up any FEC committee or state filer and get a complete financial dashboard: total raised, spent, cash on hand, burn rate, self-funding ratio, donor geography, and spend breakdown by category. Covers federal races and state races in California and Nevada.
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Full Race Briefings on Demand
Need a complete financial overview of every candidate in a race? Money Map pulls it automatically. Fundraising totals, donor network profiles, IE mapping, and contradiction analysis across all viable candidates. A full research briefing in minutes instead of days.

Built for reporters who cover money in politics. Useful for anyone who follows it.

Campaign finance is one of the most underleveraged beats in political journalism. The data is legally required to be public. The stories are hiding in plain sight. But the gap between "the data exists" and "I can report on it by tomorrow" is wide enough that most of it never gets covered.

BallotBase closes that gap. The same filings that used to require a data team or a full day of manual research are searchable, readable, and cross-referenceable in minutes. So you can spend your time on the story, not the spreadsheet.

See what's in a race you're covering right now.

Request a demo and we'll pull up a live briefing on any race you name. Donor patterns, IE spending, contradiction analysis. Real data, on the record.

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Integrations

Real-time donation sync

Connect your fundraising platform and every gift lands in your dashboard the moment it hits — pacing, refcodes, and pledges included.

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