https://github.com/jlwhelan28/pac-hunter

Lookup donation history of a Political Action Committee to specific US federal election candidates using data sourced directly from the FEC
https://github.com/jlwhelan28/pac-hunter

election-analysis election-data elections ethics political-data-analysis united-states

Last synced: 5 months ago
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Lookup donation history of a Political Action Committee to specific US federal election candidates using data sourced directly from the FEC

• Host: GitHub
• URL: https://github.com/jlwhelan28/pac-hunter
• Owner: jlwhelan28
• License: mit
• Created: 2022-10-16T03:42:22.000Z (over 3 years ago)
• Default Branch: main
• Last Pushed: 2022-11-14T03:39:44.000Z (over 3 years ago)
• Last Synced: 2025-08-17T21:22:19.877Z (10 months ago)
• Topics: election-analysis, election-data, elections, ethics, political-data-analysis, united-states
• Language: Jupyter Notebook
• Homepage:
• Size: 1.28 MB
• Stars: 14
• Watchers: 1
• Forks: 0
• Open Issues: 0
• Metadata Files:
  • Readme: README.md
  • Changelog: CHANGELOG.md
  • License: LICENSE

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README

          
# 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](https://api.open.fec.gov/developers/). 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.

Run the demo notebook yourself in-browser with Binder [here](https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/jlwhelan28/pac-hunter/main?filepath=demo.ipynb)

##  Example: Raytheon Technologies' PAC donations to 2020 election deniers

![](heatmap_example.png)

# 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.