27 May 2016

Campaign finance report defect

I don’t know how I missed this before. The dates of contributions from individuals are missing from Montana’s form C-5 campaign finance reports. This inexplicable omission denies voters valuable information.

The dates of disbursements are included in the reports, as are the dates of contributions from political action committees.

Not so incidentally, insofar as I can determine, there is no way to download all campaign finance reports in a single file that can be imported into a database. Not making such a file available brings joy to the hearts of the dark money crowd — and heartburn to bloggers who want to do their own analysis.