Photo from Flickr: Daniel Ramirez

How much money is involved in Hawai‘i elections?
...and who is behind it all?

By looking at public data on state and county candidate contributions, expenditures, and disclosures published on data.hawaii.gov (see data sources below) we can take a broad look at the amount of money influencing politics in Hawai‘i. Rather than focusing on individual candidates I wanted to quickly compare different aspects of the data that can otherwise remain hidden.

Click anywhere on the graphs or bar charts below to quickly filter results.

If you know of other data that should be added to this please let me know.

Fork it on Github


Created by Jon Geyer {Supraset}

Disclaimers

To prepare the data I did some minor cleansing with Open Refine. Altogether the data used in the tool below is rather large (roughly 25mb), and could use some further optimization.

This tool is really designed for larger screens -- a mobile friendly version might be possible in the future.

More Information

State's breakdown of campaign spending: data.hawaii.gov/apps/campaignspending

Hawaii Campaign Spending from Civic Celerator: viz.hawaiicampaignspending.com

Funding a Hawaii State Legislature commoncausehawaii.github.io/leg_campaigns

Civil Beat's Financial Disclosures database: civilbeat.com/disclosures

From the National Institute on Money in State Politics: followthemoney.org


Campaign Contributions Made to Candidates (2006 - 2015)


How important are big donors compared to small donors?
Who have been the big political donors and recipients?
Data Source: data.hawaii.gov

Dollars: 0

Records: 0

Contributions per Week
Candidates (Top 40 of X)
Donors (Top 30 of X)
Contributor Type
Office
Party
In State

Campaign Expenditures Made by Candidates (2006 - 2015)


Who have been the big spenders?
What did they spending all that money on?
Data Source: data.hawaii.gov

Dollars: 0

Records: 0

Expenses per Week
Candidates (Top 40 of X)
Expense Category
Office
Party
In State

Financial Disclosures Submitted by State Employees and Candidates (2009 - 2015)


The financial disclosures data does not list dollar amounts but only the nature of the disclosure. As a result, this data is not very revealing. We can see relationships, but not how deep or shallow those relationships are.

However, the public data does point to PDF's that have dollar amounts or in many cases disclosures categorized with financial codes. A PDF scraper could chip away at this, but it's really a mess. Greater uniformity in the disclosure filing forms is really the only solution.
Data Source: data.hawaii.gov

Records: 0

Filings per Week
Filer (Top 40 of X)
Department/Board (Top 40 of X)
Type
Amended Disclosure