Data Acquisition
The Arizona Secretary of State provides access to campaign finance reports in two ways:
- Website – The Arizona website provides two different interfaces for browsing campaign finance information:
- Filer lists – This interface allows users to search by filer name and view reported transactions on the site, or as PDFs.
- Advanced Search – This interface provides transaction-level search capability.
- Database by request – There is no readily available download from the website, but you can request an Access database directly from the Secretary of State. They will provide a link to a download.
Transparency USA requests the database following each filing deadline. Since this appears to be their entire database, Arizona provides one of the most consistent and complete data sets we have.
Reported Data
The database Transparency USA receives from Arizona contains quite a few more types of records than is typical. Here, we’ll show which of these record types we use, and which we don’t.
Committee Records
These records represent the candidates and committees registered to file with the state.
Transparency USA imports all of these records since they’re the basis for all transactional filing.
Related record types:
- Names
- Parties
- Offices
- Cycles
- Counties
Transaction Records
These records include all sorts of reported transactional activity. Each record provides a specific type from a list of about 170. These types describe the transaction, like monetary, non-monetary (in-kind), refunds, or interest, and each type is grouped into one of three categories – income, expenditures, and neutral.
Transparency USA imports all “income” records as contributions, and all “expenditures” records as expenditures. We do not currently import the “neutral” records.
Related record types:
- Transaction Types
- Income Expense Neutral
- Names
- Entity Types
- Committees
- Categories
Unused Record Types
Some of the record types provided by Arizona are unused, such as Ballot Measures.
Transparency USA may support these in the future.
Party Information
Transparency USA displays the current party affiliation for active candidates and officeholders. The party information displayed may not be accurate:
- For candidates who are not actively running for or serving in state-level office
- When accessing candidate or officeholder data from previous election cycles
Party affiliation for active candidates and officeholders is provided by Ballotpedia.