By Rebecca Bowe
This week, the Guardian offers a look at the biggest spenders in local politics, using SF Ethics Commission campaign-finance data from 1998 to 2008. The Ethics’ Campaign Finance Database is an excellent tool for answering questions about which organizations have given money to which causes and candidates over the years, but the system could be a lot more user friendly.
For instance, plunging into the bowels of the SF Ethics Commission database to try and find out who’s opening the fattest wallets come election time isn’t as easy a task as the average voter might hope. Although the information is a matter of public record that’s available to everyone, there is no ranking system that makes the highest donors easy to spot – so researchers literally have to pick through tens of thousands of data rows in order to spot the high contributions. Meanwhile, there are limitations with the short-cut method of finding such information, which is to use the “Advanced Search” function on the city agency’s Web page. That search engine spits back incomplete results: Our No. 2 top donor, for example, doesn’t show up, even though a comprehensive search of the campaign-finance spreadsheet from 2001 reveals that he contributed some $3.5 million to his own run for mayor.