Gathering Campaign Finance Data

It was a monumental task gathering the Schor campaign's contribution and expenditure data. It comes from the pre-primary report filed with the Ingham County Clerk. The reports on the Clerk's site are PDF files, not electronic files, which means there is no way to simply import the data into a spreadsheet (I use Excel). It has to be manually typed. Name, occupation, employer, date and amount for 448 contributions. Payee, purpose, date and amount for 111 expenditures. It took several hours a day for 4 or 5 days. And then another couple hours finding my mistakes. This is what it takes to get the data into a form that can be sorted in sequences that make it useful and informative.

I could be wrong, but I believe the Schor campaign uses an app (software) called MERTS that the State of Michigan provides free of charge. It is capable of producing the electronic file required for state-level filers. It can also produce a printed report, and it is the printed report that local candidates submit to the county clerk. Local candidates can also prepare the report by hand as, for example, Patricia Spitzley did.

So the Schor campaign submitted a printed report as required by the Ingham County Clerk when they could also have submitted an electronic file I could have downloaded and imported easily into Excel. It would be nice if the County Clerk would encourage filers who use MERTS or any software that produces a file in the proper format to submit the electronic file as well as the paper/PDF report and make those electronic files available to the public. It would make campaign finance data much more accessible.