Editorial & Corrections Policy

PlainInfluence turns three federal disclosure datasets — FEC campaign finance, Senate LDA lobbying, and USAspending contracts — into politician, organization, issue, and state pages. This page explains how those pages are produced, the standards we hold them to, and exactly how to flag a number that looks wrong.

How pages are produced

PlainInfluence's politician, organization, issue, and state pages are generated from three documented public datasets: the Federal Election Commission's bulk campaign-finance filings, the U.S. Senate Office of Public Records' Lobbying Disclosure Act filings, and federal contract awards from USAspending.gov. We load each source into a structured database, link the same organization across all three through an entity-resolution pipeline, and render every page from that database. The dollar amounts you see — contributions, lobbying spend, contract awards, and independent expenditures — are reproduced from the official filings, not hand-typed and not estimated by us.

This is a data-publishing model: the same template renders thousands of pages so that every tracked entity is covered consistently. We are transparent that these data pages are produced programmatically from the source filings rather than written individually. The editorial work goes into the pipeline (how data is sourced, normalized, entity-resolved, and computed), the methodology, and the written guides — not into hand-authoring thousands of near-identical entity pages, which would add no accuracy and invite inconsistency.

Sourcing standards

  • Primary sources only. Every figure traces to FEC, Senate LDA, or USAspending.gov bulk data. We do not republish third-party aggregators or scraped totals.
  • Attribution in context. Each data page names its source datasets and the election cycle near the figures, and links to the methodology that explains how each measure is defined.
  • Contributions and outside spending are kept separate. Independent expenditures (super-PAC spending for or against a candidate) are never counted as money a candidate "received." Conflating the two — as raw FEC receipt totals do — would badly mislead; our methodology documents the distinction.
  • Derived values are labeled. Numbers we compute — national percentile rankings, combined-influence totals, and aggregates — are presented as our analysis of the underlying filings, distinct from the figures as filed.
  • No invented data. Where a filing is amended, the most recent version supersedes the original; where data is partial (for example, lobbying disclosures that report spending in ranges), we say so rather than implying false precision.

Update cadence

The FEC, Senate LDA, and USAspending.gov publish on their own schedules — FEC and lobbying filings are released throughout each cycle, and contract data updates continuously. We refresh our database when new bulk data is published, recompute the affected aggregates and rankings, and show the data cycle on every page. Because the underlying records are official filings, figures are stable between refreshes; the reference cycle shown on each page tells you which release a page is based on.

Corrections process

If a figure on PlainInfluence looks wrong, please tell us. Because our pages are generated from federal filings, a genuine error almost always traces back to either the source data or our processing of it — so this is how we handle a report:

  1. Report. Email us through the contact page with the page URL and the number that looks off.
  2. Verify. We compare the figure against the official FEC, Senate LDA, or USAspending bulk filing for that entity and cycle.
  3. Fix at the source. If the value is wrong on our side — most often an entity-resolution mismatch — we correct it in the database and pipeline that generate the page, not just on the single page, so every affected page is fixed at once. If the figure faithfully reflects the official filing, we explain that and, where useful, add context.
  4. Note it. Material corrections that change a published figure are reflected the next time the page rebuilds, with the data cycle shown so you can see which release a page is based on.

We aim to acknowledge data-error reports within a few business days.

Editorial independence

PlainInfluence is an independent publisher and is not affiliated with the FEC, the Senate, USAspending.gov, or any government agency, campaign, PAC, or lobbying firm. We do not accept payment, sponsorship, or promoted placement from any entity we cover. Our only revenue source is contextual display advertising; advertisers do not influence which entities we cover or how we present data. Our rankings are computed mechanically from the filings, so no politician, organization, or firm can pay to move up — or down — a list.

Appropriate use

PlainInfluence is for informational and civic-transparency purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or compliance advice. The data describes disclosed federal activity as filed; it is not a complete picture of anyone's political influence, and undisclosed activity (for example, donors to certain 501(c) organizations) is by definition not captured. See our disclaimer for details before drawing conclusions about any individual or organization.