From time to time, you may want to do a little research into who gets what from whom and what they spend it on. Of course, the topic is Campaign Contributions. The information is available, some on line, some downtown.

If you want to check up on local candidates, winners and losers alike, go to the Election Board office on the first floor of the City-County Building. The helpful staff will provide you with the campaign finance reports of any current local officeholder or candidate. The remaining reports are stored, but will be dusted off and brought to the Board office within a few days of a request. Reports are only legally required a few times each year. For instance, the last report covered donations received and money spent from October 11, 2003 through the end of the year. The Clerk’s Office hopes to begin posting this information online next year, when they are not so occupied with election issues.

Candidates on Indiana ballots for state or national offices, political parties, and political action committees (PAC’s), must all file campaign finance reports with the Secretary of State and those reports are posted online at: www.indianacampaignfinance.com. This site is a bit intimidating, until you become familiar with the forms and how information can be located. One simple approach is to click on ’Search’ in the home page menu. The ’Search’ page has four ways to look for information. You can click on a link to either search for a contributor or candidate. Those two searches are pretty self-explanatory.

If your interests lay with political party organizations, for instance, in Marion County, you can reach their reports by going to the ’Search’ page, then clicking on ‘Committee Search’. Once on the ‘Committee Search’ page, type “marion county” in the ‘Committee Name’ box, hit the ’Search’ button and a new page will appear with a number of political party organizations with “marion county” in their title. Select the one you were looking for to view any reports they filed since 1997.

If you are interested in perusing the lists of party organizations or PAC’s, simply select that item from the ‘Committee Type’ dropdown box on the ‘Committee Search’ page.

Next month: some interesting, some curious, results of our campaign finance research.

link to part 2