pac-hunter 0.1.1

Search donations from specific PACs to candidates of interest, using OpenFEC and fivethirtyeight data

pac_hunter :wolf:

A simple project inspired by frustration over employers attempting to raise money from their employees captive audiences for the purpose of fueling their purchase of loyalty from politicians via Political Action Committees (PACs) in the United States.

pac_hunter provides a wrapper around the fantastic API provided by the Federal Elections Committee called OpenFEC. This tool is designed to match a PAC of interest with donations made to specific federal election candidates. The use case that inspired this tool was checking historical donations of a PAC to federal candidates or elected officials that denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Getting started

Check the jupyter notebook provided with this repository demo.ipynb. You will have to either request your own self-service API key from the OpenFEC project, or use their "DEMO_KEY" which has a stricter rate limit.

If you are not familiar with running jupyter notebooks from a local environment, look forward to a google colab notebook once I've published the package. In the meantime, you can run the demo yourself as long as you have python and git installed on your system.

git clone https://github.com/jlwhelan28/pac-hunter.git
cd pac-hunter
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install jupyter
jupyter notebook

Example: Raytheon Technologies' PAC donations to 2020 election deniers

Future release

I'm hopeful to provide a small service that runs a streamlit app providing a simple interface to use this tool for non-developers. Beyond that, future plans will depend on interest.