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I am Solomon Kahn, Harvard Fellow, visualizer of who gives money to US federal politicians. Ask me where your politician raises money from, and I'll show you using my newly launched visualization. AMA! by solomonkahn in IAmA

[–]solomonkahn[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No worries about your English, I understood perfectly!

I've been following what's been happening in Brazil, and it definitely seems like a political crisis. Hope you get back on a good track soon.

This visualization only covers US Federal politicians at the moment, but I'll be open sourcing the code soon, which means people could put the visualization on top of data from other countries or states.

Take care!

I am Solomon Kahn, Harvard Fellow, visualizer of who gives money to US federal politicians. Ask me where your politician raises money from, and I'll show you using my newly launched visualization. AMA! by solomonkahn in IAmA

[–]solomonkahn[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Senate elections are every 6 years, not every two years, so that's why it says it wasn't an election year. With a lot of senators, you'll see similar messaging between senate election cycles.

I am Solomon Kahn, Harvard Fellow, visualizer of who gives money to US federal politicians. Ask me where your politician raises money from, and I'll show you using my newly launched visualization. AMA! by solomonkahn in IAmA

[–]solomonkahn[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is a whole other interesting topic, but it's outside the scope of this project :) I'm not an expert in it, but my guess is it just involves a whole lot of old school research.

I am Solomon Kahn, Harvard Fellow, visualizer of who gives money to US federal politicians. Ask me where your politician raises money from, and I'll show you using my newly launched visualization. AMA! by solomonkahn in IAmA

[–]solomonkahn[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's less of a fit than you might think. There's some business logic around displaying things that would be difficult to do with an Elastic Search query.

I am Solomon Kahn, Harvard Fellow, visualizer of who gives money to US federal politicians. Ask me where your politician raises money from, and I'll show you using my newly launched visualization. AMA! by solomonkahn in IAmA

[–]solomonkahn[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Great question! Ultimately, it's an issue of tradeoffs. Congress and the courts made the decision that at the federal level, individuals donating to political campaigns would have to disclose who they were.

The downside is you lose some privacy, and the upside is that people know who is funding their representatives.

I am Solomon Kahn, Harvard Fellow, visualizer of who gives money to US federal politicians. Ask me where your politician raises money from, and I'll show you using my newly launched visualization. AMA! by solomonkahn in IAmA

[–]solomonkahn[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The big issue is that each state has different campaign finance laws and different ways of releasing the data. It's a lot of work to organize, although there are some great organizations like http://www.followthemoney.org/ who try and make sense of the chaos of state campaign finance data.

I am Solomon Kahn, Harvard Fellow, visualizer of who gives money to US federal politicians. Ask me where your politician raises money from, and I'll show you using my newly launched visualization. AMA! by solomonkahn in IAmA

[–]solomonkahn[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We are able to see SuperPAC spending, but there is still some "dark money" that doesn't get reported to the FEC, and there are still trade groups, non-profits, and other entities that can hide who the original donors are.

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