Dec 26, 2014
There’s no better resource than the Illinois State Board of Elections website when it comes to following the money in Illinois elections.
Unfortunately, navigating the site find what you’re looking for can be a bit less than user friendly to newcomers to the site or to those who don’t use it often.
On this edition of “Only in Illinois,” I take you on a video tour of the site and show how to do a basic search of a candidate’s campaign contributions. Once you find what you’re looking for, I show you how to put it into a spreadsheet so you can sort it and search it to get the most out of the information you’ve gathered.
In the example in the video, I sort through Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner’s campaign fund. Using this tutorial, you’ll be able to do the same for any candidate for Illinois state office. Step-by-step instructions are posted below the video.
So let’s get started!
The step-by-step guide below is intended to help any user with access to a spreadsheet learn to navigate the site for basic campaign contribution information and then sort the data in a spreadsheet. There are two sections below. The first covers how to search a candidate’s campaign committee for all contributions reported to date. The second section covers searching itemized quarterly reports.
- Start at Board of Elections website (http://www.elections.il.gov/) and choose “Contributions search – all contributions” from “Top Pages” menu on left
- Click the “By Committees” tab and enter the name of the candidate or (if you know it) the committee’s ID number. In the example, I’m searching for Bruce Rauner’s committee.
- Hit Search and you’ll get this result:
- Click “Download This List” and then select “Tab-Delimited Text File”
- The file will then download. It’ll be called “Receipts.” Open it and you’ll see a mish-mash of text (shown below). Select all (Control-A) and copy to your clipboard (Control-C)
- Open a new spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel, Google documents or any spreadsheet you like) and copy (Control-V) all the text into it. I’m using Excel in the example below.
- Use Excel’s Sort and Filter function to sort the list as you wish (by date, highest to lowest contribution, etc.). The example below is sorted by contribution highest to lowest.
SEARCHING QUARTERLY REPORTS
You also can search itemized lists from D-2 Quarterly Reports, which are due on the 15th of January, April, July and October and cover contributions, expenses and transfers by quarter. This is especially useful for finding how much a candidate is spending on specific expenses, particularly media. (The method above is better for tracking contributions because it’s up to the minute for contributions of $1,000 or over, which must be reported immediately.) As in the example above, you’ll need to move the report data into a spreadsheet for sorting. To move data from a D-2 Quarterly Report into a spreadsheet for sorting, follow these steps. 1. Instead of choosing “contributions search” from the main Board of Elections website, choose “committee search.”
2. Enter the committee name or number you’re looking for. In this example, I entered the number of Bruce Rauner’s committee because I already know the number. 
3. Click the committee name:
4. You’ll see this screen, from which you will click on “quarterly” under “report type:” 
If “quarterly” is not listed under “report type” on the first screen, scroll to bottom of page and click “next.” Repeat until you arrive at a screen containing a quarterly report.
5. Click on “itemized” for whichever report you want to search. In this example, we’ll search individual contributions: 
6. On the next screen, click “print this list” in upper right:
7. That will put all the donations onto one big sheet that looks like this:
8. Use control-A to select all. Then control-C to place on your clipboard. Open a new spreadsheet and control-V to copy all data into it. You’ll end up with this: 
You can delete the top three rows and begin sorting, searching and adding filters as you need them just as in the contributions search above. To search a committee’s expenditures, return to Step 8 and select “8. Expenditures > itemized.”
When you copy and paste itemized expenditures into a spreadsheet, you’ll see this. Column E (purpose/beneficiary) tells you what each expenditure was for. Filtering this column for the word “media” will let you find out how much a candidate spent on media-related expenses. 