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Ethics Commission unveils interactive campaign finance dashboards, to publish ballot-measure and ‘democracy facts’ tools in October
Summary
Information Technology Officer Steven Massey demonstrated new, open-data campaign finance dashboards that let users filter 260,000 transactions, inspect late contributions, and view candidate and ballot-measure analytics; the Democracy Facts label and ballot-measure dashboard will be released after the pre-election filing deadline in early October.
Steven Massey, the Ethics Commission’s Information Technology Officer, demonstrated new interactive campaign finance tools at a Commission meeting, saying the platform “is built on open data” and that it includes campaign finance transactions stretching back to about 1998.
Massey told commissioners the office has developed three public-facing projects: a campaign finance dashboard for candidate activity; a ballot-measure dashboard that lets users browse committees by measure letter and identify top contributors and geographic origins; and a “democracy facts” label adapted from academic work that highlights the share of money coming from the top contributors. “We have all the campaign finance transactions that includes all the contributions that go back to about 1998. There’s about 260,000 of them,” he said.
Why it matters: the tools are designed to make large-scale campaign-finance data easier for the public, journalists and researchers to parse. Massey demonstrated features that highlight large donations or loans in the 90-day late-reporting window before an election, map contributor ZIP codes, and show public-financing disbursements and cash balances for candidate committees.
How it works: the Commission’s systems are hosted by Netfile (a contract the office said has been in place since 2007) and are synchronized to the city’s DataSF open-data portal. Massey described a three-part stack — a public-access website, an electronic-filing program and an administrative back end — and said dashboards update automatically when new filings are received. He described distributed hosting for the dashboards and multiple Netfile backups as protections against data loss.
Examples cited in the demonstration included candidate pages for District 10 (where the presenter noted spending and cash-balance differences among named candidates) and a ballot-measure view showing concentrated funding for certain measures; Massey noted that one measure’s contributions were concentrated among a small number of related donors and that geographic overlays showed concentrated activity near Golden Gate Park for a parks-related measure.
Security and reliability: commissioners asked about data integrity and capacity during hotly contested filing deadlines. Massey said commission staff cannot directly modify filings once submitted, that Netfile maintains snapshots and backups and that the dashboard host is a distributed service intended to handle traffic spikes.
Rollout timeline: Massey said the campaign finance dashboards for candidate races are available now on the office website, while the Democracy Facts label and the Ballot Measure dashboards will be released after the first pre-election filing deadline in early October.
Next steps: commissioners and staff discussed outreach, including collaborating with Code for America and academic partners to encourage public use of the tools. The presentation drew public comment on related city open-data issues but produced no Commission action.
