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Geog 376 Final project

Geog 376 Final project . Nicole Stotz Spring 2010. Purpose. The FEC provides campaign finance data online for election cycles 1976-present Contributions totaling $200 must be reported For the 2008 elections, who donated what, and to who?

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Geog 376 Final project

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  1. Geog 376 Final project Nicole Stotz Spring 2010

  2. Purpose • The FEC provides campaign finance data online for election cycles 1976-present • Contributions totaling $200 must be reported • For the 2008 elections, who donated what, and to who? • Parsed data for San Joaquin County, and attempted to represent this on a zip code level.

  3. Data • FEC individual contributions and candidate files for 2008 • California ZTCA file from Census Bureau (like a zipcode, but is linked to demographic data) • San Joaquin County shapefile from CalAtlas

  4. Data Setup • FEC provides a pdf on dealing with their data • It was imported into Access, and exported as a formatted csv • Surprise, lots of errors! • Surprise, huge files! • Surprise, my computer couldn’t handle processing…20+ minutes processing times were common

  5. How do I fix this? • A custom dictionary replace script was the answer • No NULL values, extra commas, weird names, overpunch characters • There is no apparent use for overpunch characters, the FEC only tells how to get rid of them

  6. Replace script

  7. Creating Fields and Table

  8. Read CSV into a GDB

  9. Replace overpunch characters…

  10. Adding NULL values…

  11. Joining tables, creating San Joaquin contributions table

  12. Results • Created 3 scripts in total – to parse text files, and to join them together • Was not able to graphically represent my queries • Was able to get a subset of 1700+ records of San Joaquin contributions for 2008

  13. Weird Result • While parsing the California subset individual contributions, I couldn’t find individual donations to McCain • Either all individual donations in California were under $200, and not reported • Or major committees collected these donations • Or no one in California really liked McCain enough to make a large donation • Or my data was somehow messed up (this one is most likely)

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