February 25
planet gnome campaign finance report
Recently I found that the Huffington Post is running a site called FundRace 2008, which allows you to view campaign donation amounts from certain people, areas, job types, or employers. According to their website:
FundRace makes it easy to search by name or address to see which presidential candidates your friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors are contributing to. Or you can see if your favorite celebrity is putting their money where their mouth is.
It gives you a google map showing the donors in the area you searched for. Originally created by EyeBeam here are the details:
All calculations are based on public records filed with the FEC of contributions by all individuals totaling more than $200 (and some totaling less than $200) to a single Republican or Democratic presidential campaign or national committee for the 2004 and 2008 election cycles.
FundRace is updated according to the reporting schedule set by the FEC. Public contribution data is geocoded using public U.S. Census Bureau data. Dynamic maps are powered by Google Maps.
Using Fund Race application I did a quick search of bloggers syndicated on Planet GNOME who I’ve seen write on American political topics somewhat actively. Here’s what I found from a small list of people I tried searching for.
Individuals
$2,300 to Barack Obama
$300 to Ron Paul
$1,525 to Barack Obama
$600 to John McCain
And here is an incomplete list of companies active on Planet GNOME.
Companies
$57,620 was given by people who identified their employer as “sun microsystems*”.
$19,389 to Republicans $38,231 to Democrats
$19,940 was given by people who identified their employer as “red hat*”.
$5,074 to Republicans $14,866 to Democrats
$15,803 was given by people who identified their employer as “novell*”.
$4,710 to Republicans $11,093 to Democrats
$14,340 was given by people who identified their employer as “VMWare*”.
$2,125 to Republicans $12,215 to Democrats
$518 was given by people who identified their employer as “canonical*”.
$268 to Republicans $250 to Democrats
Caveats
Obviously this is U.S. centric and these numbers aren’t complete. They require accurate census data and the person had to have donated more than $200 to a single campaign, not just $200 in total to multiple campaigns.
Further
I found this tool really interesting precisely because it allowed me to create a report of my little world of who and how much people were putting towards different political agendas. Are we democratizing yet? Of course some people had already actively promoted how much and where it was going.
Now you should do your own searches, please drop the interesting ones in my comments.
I do find it a little weird that real addresses are shown for each person but I can see how you need that information to determine if you’re looking at the correct person, I’m sorry if anyone is upset about that.
Canonical is linking to Sun.com
whoops! fixed, thanks K
Let me be the first to say that calling out the contributions of individuals in a blog post feels questionable, and makes me kinda queasy. It almost feels like a violation of privacy.
Though I’m not sure what effect being friends with these people has on me.
It’s an interesting privacy question.
Votes had to be made private so that you couldn’t prove you voted for someone and thus be bought off.
I wonder how long it will be until we find a union member who is harassed or ostracized because he donated to an individual the organization didn’t endorse.
What’s interesting is that the privacy of every individual in that system has already been violated in those terms you mention. Of course they likely didn’t know it until now… which does mean something.
I spent a lot of time wondering about if I was actually calling those people out. I didn’t call out any individual who didn’t write about politics, so I don’t feel like I’m attacking people who quietly made their choices. Each of them actively writes about politics in their own blogs. That said with them as friends it was difficult to not think that I’m lifting a skirt.
Bryan > If the information was publicily available, there is no problem that you “forward” it.
If people are angry at you, they should be at the first source. It’s like security by obscurity : it didn’t work.
Anyway, Nat and Miguel were never secret about their opinion. Robert Love try to be as neutral as possible and I like to follow his really insightful Twitter report. I’m surprised he’s for McCain, in fact I never really asked myself what was his opinion. That’s kinda funny
But, anyway, I really hope that in the Gnome community, we can appreciate each other even if we don’t agree on politic.
So, really, I appreciate your post, it’s interesting.
I would hope that anyone donating to a political campaign would understand that information about the donation *ought* to be public, in any properly regulated democracy, and should be willing to accept the consequences of that.
The principle of a private ballot of one man, one vote requires privacy because all men have an equal weight in the vote. Where each man can spend arbitrary amounts of money to influence the outcome of a campaign, it would be totally inappropriate to allow their donations to be kept secret.
This is not an accurate statement. Robert Love has been forthright in his personal opinions and attitudes, and has been abundantly clear in what drives his vote. His contribution isn’t at all surprising.
– Chris
American elections truly suck. Where I come from, giving politicians money with the intention of affecting the outcome of an election is known as “corruption”.
Odd, my contribution to Kucinich is not showing up.
But also I should have matched Nat now, with the full contribution to Obama. It should show up in the next refresh.
Am glad that this information is not private, the point of having this information public is to avoid some billionaire to over-fund a particular candidate, everyone is limited to 2,300.
I must agree with Alex. The fact this information is available does not make this post okay. There are many acts that are immoral but based on public information. Also uproar over the Facebook Friend Feed. Compilation and processing add value, but the big issue is why call these people out? A set of three is a small set to work off. And while Miguel is very political, Nat and Robert are not. Nat obviously raised money for Obama but he never blogs on politics. And Robert blogs on economics not politics. (I thought he liked Obama from his posts?) This truly leaves me uncomfortable and seems to serve no purpose…
it’s funny to think that pro transparency people when it comes to source code suddenly feel violated when public donations to public campaigns are made … public? Everyone who donates to these campaigns knows that it can be traced and if you really want to keep it a secret you can donate to a group that doesn’t have the transparency rules. There are some public domain things that i think most people outside of stalkers would feel bad looking up, but public money like this certainly shouldn’t be.
also speaking as a trained economist, i’m shocked that people are shocked by robert love’s donation!
My immediate feeling was the same as Alex’s – that it *feels* like exposing something private. Of course, as other commentators have pointed out, this is, and more importantly, *should* be public knowledge.
And I’m also interested to see the consequences of integrating and analyzing the data (semi-)publicly available in Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, etc. There are certainly bound to be some interesting surprises (especially for the people who don’t realize exactly how public their voluntarily- and involuntarily-contributed information is).
I knew that my contributions were public information when I made them, and I’m glad this information is public.
@SW: What about spending your own money to promote a candidate? Is that corruption too? And what’s the difference?
When I was more closely involved with a political party in Norway a few years ago, contributions were anonymous. Nobody on the financing committee held elected office, and nobody outside the financing committee knew who the donors were.
Sounds like a good system to me, provided, of course, that the nobody cheated and told the elected politicians where the money came from.
I suppose that’s why the system was abandoned, and larger contributions now must be disclosed in Norway as well.