Campaign finance laws are complicated, and vary from state to state. I won’t pretend to be a lawyer, nor pretend to know anything about campaign financing. What I can tell you though, is that campaign finance information is a matter of public record. As such, information regarding political contributions is freely available online from a number of different sources.
Here are a few different resources for researching political campaign contributions:
All three of these sites allow you to search and sort by name, location, etc…
Even though campaign finance information is available to the public, there are restrictions on how this data can be used. Here’s the official disclaimer from Political Money Line’s search page:
There are restrictions on the use of the data in these downloads of data. The Federal Election Campaign Act, as amended, states that the Commission shall make these documents “available for public inspection and copying, at the expense of the person requesting such copying, except that any information copied from such reports of statements may not be sold or used by any person for the purpose of soliciting contributions or for commercial purposes, other than using the name and address of any political committee to solicit contributions from such committee. A political committee may submit 10 pseudonyms on each report filed in order to protect against illegal use of names and addresses of contributors, provided such committee attaches a list of such pseudonyms to the appropriate report. The Secretary or the Commission shall exclude these lists from the public record.”
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