After the 2010 Citizens United decision, the FEC started requiring “super PACs” to file reports within 24-48 hours of an expenditure. Previously, committees only had to file once a month, so now we have campaign finance data much closer to real time. However, early on in the primary season, there wasn’t a resource to easily show the flow of money as it was spent. We created PAC Track to pull in the filings (with the assistance of the NYT Campaign Finance API) and show them in a feed, by state, and on a twitter account. We also started showing contributor data.

The PAC Track app led to a few more projects, such as a treemap of the super PACs’ biggest donors, and a project to show the top payees of both campaigns and PACs.

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