Exclusive: FEC overhauls website to make it easier to track campaign money

WASHINGTON — Ann Ravel, the chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission, hasn’t had much success with her crusade to push the six-member panel to curb the unlimited money flooding congressional and presidential elections.

So, she has helped spearhead another project: a $2.5 million overhaul of the agency’s website that she says will make it easier for average citizens to follow the money themselves.

On Thursday morning, the general public will get its first look at a working version of https://beta.fec.gov, which tries to make it simpler to figure out who is funding elections and how politicians are spending donors’ money. Among the many changes: The new version can be viewed on any size screen, allowing users to view campaign-finance data on their mobile phones and tablets.

“This is a way to provide important information people can use when they vote, and it also allows the public and others, such as the Department of Justice, to deter corruption,” Ravel told USA TODAY.

Ravel, a former California election regulator who has chaired the commission since last December, has been a vocal critic of her own agency, routinely lambasting the panel for deadlocking along party lines on major enforcement, such as the role of foreign money in state and local elections and the growing influence of anonymous donors in elections.

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Several campaign watchdog groups have taken their complaints about potential campaign-finance abuses directly to federal prosecutors at the Department of Justice.

For all the discord at the FEC, however, “the disclosure role of the agency is what there is agreement about,” Ravel said.

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FEC’s disclosure database contains more than 14 billion data elements, and Ravel said she finds the current site so hard to navigate that she usually just asks a staffer to find the information she wants.

“I hate to admit this,” she said. “I consider myself a fairly savvy consumer of tech information, but it’s just not worth my time.”

She said the new site will be more intuitive.

Want to know how much Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has raised for the presidential campaign on the current site? That’s easier if you know that his name appears in official records as Edward Rafael “Ted” Cruz. His campaign committee: Cruz for President.

On the new site, information about all the candidates running for a single office is grouped together, allowing users to see at a glance who is seeking the presidency or a single House or Senate seat and how their fundraising compares with rivals.

The updated version also boasts a streamlined, easy-to-read look. Maps quickly illustrate the sources of campaign money to individual candidates. (For instance, the new site shows that his home state of Wisconsin is the No. 1 source of donations to Rep. Paul Ryan, who is set to become the next House speaker.)

Behind-the-scenes fixes to infrastructure include moving the site from the FEC’s servers to a cloud environment. The change will allow users to search millions of contributions and spending records to retrieve results quickly and avoid the slowdown that currently can occur during peak usage times, officials say.

The redesign still is a work in progress with more changes planned as users provide feedback, Ravel and her aides say.

Seamus Kraft, executive director of the OpenGov Foundation, a non-profit that encourages federal, state and local agencies to share more information publicly, called the redesign a “huge leap forward.”

Kraft said FEC officials deserve credit for releasing a working version and asking users to weigh in. “How often do you see the government comfortable enough to put something out in beta?” he asked.

Plans also are underway to ease one of the most maddening problems confronting journalists and election geeks: The fact that U.S. senators and Senate candidates still file their campaign reports on paper, allowing their donors to remain hidden from the public for weeks on end.

U.S. House and presidential candidates must file their reports electronically, allowing the public to see their filings within minutes of candidates submitting them to the FEC.

Senate candidates, however, physically file paper reports, sometimes thousands of pages long, to Senate records officials, who then send them to the FEC, which pays to have the documents scanned and posted online. The information also is typed into computers to create electronic records. The whole process can take as long as a month and costs about $500,000 each year.

Repeated attempts to change federal law and require electronic Senate filings have failed.

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To speed up its work, the FEC has hired an Oakland, Calif., firm, Captricity, to “scrape” the data digitally from those paper reports and post it to the website, eliminating the laborious re-typing. The agency should have summaries of fundraising online within 48 hours of receiving paper records from the Senate and full electronic records within five days. The FEC currently has a two-year, $608,000 contract with the firm.

Ravel said officials hope to have that feature running by the end of this year. The existing website will be replaced by the redesigned version sometime next year, she said.

The FEC’s upgrade was undertaken by 18F, a relatively new government-run, digital-development operation created to help improve the performance of federal technology. (Its name is a play on the physical address, the corner of 18th and F streets in downtown Washington, of the General Services Administration, the agency that’s home to the software group.)

Earlier this year, the FEC and 18F released a new API, a tool that allows users to retrieve sets of data from the billions of records housed at the FEC. Programmers outside the government can plug into the agency’s vast storehouse through the API to build their own software applications.

Bob Biersack, a former FEC official who’s now a senior fellow with the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, has tested the API and has ideas for some improvements. But he said: “Anything that makes this mess of information approachable is a positive step.”