Why GoodVote

“We have a government responsive to the funders, not responsive to the people. That’s not a democracy. That’s a plutocracy.”

Lessig’s diagnosis is the starting point for this project. As long as campaign finance is opaque, the funders win every policy fight the public never sees. Our premise is simple: if the data is in the open — normalized, queryable, drillable — journalists, researchers, voters, and rival movements can actually follow the money. Sunlight isn’t sufficient, but it is necessary.

What we do

We take every public FEC filing — 237 million transactions across six election cycles — and rebuild it as a queryable data warehouse that answers the questions the raw files cannot: who is this donor really, what does this PAC actually support, and which lobby backed which vote. We reconcile against FEC published totals, publish our methodology, and guard every fix with regression tests so numbers don’t silently drift.

Everything is open source. Everything is free to query.

By the numbers

Who we are

GoodVote is a non-profit project focused on protecting democracy through data. We don’t take money from candidates, parties, or lobby groups — our infrastructure is funded by grants and individual contributions. We publish methodology, cite sources, and fix the numbers in public when they’re wrong.

How to use the data

• WebBrowse topics, the dashboard, and members — every number on every page is drillable down to the originating transactions.
• REST APIProgrammatic access. Read the docs.
• BigQueryFree Analytics Hub subscription; run SQL against the full warehouse. Open Analytics Hub.
• Data qualityWe publish a reconciliation against FEC totals and every fix we’ve shipped. If a number is wrong, tell us.

Open source

The frontend, API, dbt pipeline, and classification seeds are all on GitHub. Contributions, issues, and forks are welcome. Found a miscategorized PAC or a missing mega-donor? Open an issue or PR.