A Handy Way to Look at How Candidates Are Spending Campaign Cash
Volunteers have worked with the Campaign Spending Commission to create smart and easy applications to let you examine what candidates are doing with their money.
Editor’s Note: Natalie Iwasa is a candidate for Honolulu City Council District 4.
Have you ever tried to figure out who鈥檚 monetarily supporting a particular candidate or how your political contributions are being spent?
Would you like to know about all of the candidates in a particular race 鈥 not just the ones the media chooses to cover? Wouldn鈥檛 complete candidate profiles be nice?
While this is all public information that is available in various places, such as the or at the , it can be a challenge analyzing the data or seeing the big picture.
Well not anymore!
As with every election cycle, candidates are using their campaign funds to communicate with voters. A handy new computer app allows anyone to easily explore how that money is spent.
Madison Guy on Flickr
Volunteers from various organizations, including Burt Lum of Hawaii Open Data Hawaii and Carmile Lim and Corie Tanida from Common Cause Hawaii, have collaborated with the Campaign Spending Commission through its executive director, Kristin Izumi-Nitao, to create computer applications and mobile devices that will help you analyze and explore campaign spending and other election-related data.
Volunteer developers from the community have developed apps that help the commission to improve data transparency and access for the public.
Not only is it easy to access the information, clever apps make the data interesting to look at. For example, one app presents in a 鈥渂ubble鈥 format with expenditures represented by different colors 鈥 the bigger the bubble, the higher the expenditure.
And it鈥檚 easily rearranged by office, expenditure, candidate, party or amount.
Anomalies such as over $280,000 spent on 鈥渙ther鈥 stick out like a sore thumb, but it鈥檚 easy to see with one click that the amount is mainly due to donation refunds.
Would you like to compare how much candidates in a particular district received?
Take a look at contribution and fundraiser data on a by clicking on a map, and click again to get more specific details.
Other apps, such as one that allows campaign contributions to be aggregated by a single donor 鈥 including aliases 鈥 or a group of donors, are in Beta form.
These apps make it very easy for even a novice to get good information about our candidates for office. In addition, all apps on the website are free. Kudos to the volunteers who worked so hard to put them together!
