What this site is, and isn’t

Who runs it

An independent, nonpartisan student organization founded and run by Bassel Obeidat, a student in Wisconsin. It is not incorporated, is not affiliated with any campaign, party, committee or advocacy group, and accepts no money from candidates, parties, political action committees or lobbying firms.

Where the figures come from

From filings with the Federal Election Commission, fetched from the Commission’s own systems. Every profile links to the FEC page for that candidate so you can check any figure against the primary source. We don’t estimate, model or project numbers. Where we haven’t measured something, the page says so rather than showing a guess.

What the figures mean—and what they don’t

A donation is not proof of anything. That an organization gave money to a member of Congress, and that the member later voted a particular way, does not establish that one caused the other. Both facts are public record; the link between them is not, and this site does not assert one. Where votes appear beside funding, they are placed there so you can see both, not because we have shown a connection.

Several figures are floors, not totals. Money that organizations collect and direct to a campaign is measured only for the conduits we have swept so far, so any “organized” share is at least that much and possibly more. Pages using those numbers say “at least” for that reason, and it is not a hedge.

Industry labels are our editorial judgement. The FEC records that a committee is a corporation; it never records which industry it belongs to. That grouping is ours, kept as a reviewable list and described on the methodology page. Roughly a third of corporate money is left unlabeled rather than guessed at.

Nothing here is voting advice. We don’t endorse, oppose, rank or recommend candidates, and we don’t take requests to investigate particular people. The same filings are published for everyone.

Accuracy, and being wrong

Figures are checked against the Commission after they are compiled, and the site’s own consistency rules run before anything is published. That catches a lot. It will not catch everything, and this site is provided as is, without any warranty that every figure is correct or current. Filings are also amended after the fact, so a number accurate when published can stop being accurate.

If you believe something is wrong, please tell us. Confirmed errors are published on the corrections page and left there. We don’t quietly edit a page and pretend the error never happened.

If you are named on this site and believe a figure about you is wrong, write to contact@moneybehindtheballot.org with the filing that shows it. A documented correction gets made and published, not argued about.

Reusing what’s here

The underlying campaign finance data is published by the Federal Election Commission and is in the public domain. So are the official congressional portraits. Nobody needs our permission to use any of that, and we claim no rights over public records—doing so would be the same overreach this site exists to document.

The writing, design and code are ours and are not public domain. Quote us with a link, as you would any publication. Journalists and researchers are welcome to use the figures; a link back helps readers check the source themselves. If you want to republish the compiled dataset as a whole rather than cite figures from it, ask us first—we haven’t settled how that should be licensed, and we would rather agree it with you than leave it vague.

Availability

This is a small operation run by one student. The site may be offline, incomplete or out of date at any time, and we don’t promise otherwise.

Changes

These terms change when the site does. The date below moves when they do.