New Research Database: Introducing ProPublica’s 527 Explorer

From ProPublica:

Each year, people and companies contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to tax-exempt political organizations in an effort to influence elections nationwide. These organizations, commonly known as 527s after a section of the tax code, can raise unlimited sums for political spending. Today, ProPublica is releasing a database that will allow journalists, researchers and others to more easily search 527s’ finances and find patterns.

It’s a wide-ranging trove of data that includes well-known groups such as the Democratic Governors Association, which influences pivotal races nationwide, and many obscure ones, including the Minnesota-based organization Garbage Haulers for Citizen Choice, which says it advocates for local freedom of choice in waste pickup.

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The database helps you find interesting things to dig into further. It makes it easy to see that some organizations withhold the names of large donors, pay most of their money to a single company, or appear to give most of their money back to their largest donors. Whether this behavior is legal often depends on the context, experts say.

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Now that this data is more easily explorable, we look forward to seeing what you discover in it. You can drill into state-level data to find the biggest players and largest organizations in your state, or you can take advantage of the powerful search and look up notable people, or sort and filter to see the largest donations made in a year or to a specific organization.

In addition to our similar organizations feature, we’ve added another way to help you uncover connections across organizations. Each contribution and expenditure has its own page, which uses machine learning to show similar contributions and expenditures, allowing you to do things like find other contributions that likely came from Walmart, regardless of minor variations in name or address.

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Filed under: Associations and Organizations, Data Files, News