Data Acquisition
The Colorado Secretary of State provides access to campaign finance reports in two ways:
- Tracer Website – The Colorado “TRACER” website provides several different interfaces for browsing campaign finance information including committee searches for viewing complete filed reports and transaction searches for finding individual contributions, expenditures, and loans.
- CSV Downloads – Contributions, expenditures, and loans can be downloaded in comma-separated-value (CSV) files. Additionally, lists of committees can be downloaded from their committee search results.
Transparency USA downloads and imports the CSV files.
Reported Data
Transparency USA processes four CSV file types – contributions, expenditures, loans, and committee lists.
Committees
These records represent the candidates and committees registered to file campaign finance reports with the state.
Transparency USA imports all of these records because they are the basis for transactional filing.
Contributions
These records include all contributions, including monetary and non-monetary (in-kind) contributions.
Transparency USA imports all data from these files.
Expenditures
These records include all monetary expenditures, including money spent or donated to others..
Transparency USA imports all data from these files.
Loans
These records contain information about loans received along with re-payments made.
Transparency USA displays the loans received on our loans details page. However, we list the loan payments as expenditures.
A Note About Amendments
In most states, a reported transaction can be “amended” to change or remove its value. For example, if a $20 payment was reported in error, it might be marked “amended,” and it would be replaced by a $0 “amendment” record. Transparency USA will typically exclude the amended record from our system, and only display the amendment.
In Colorado, those amended records are offset by their related amendment. For example, the $20 amended record will be listed alongside a $-20 amendment record. Transparency USA has elected to display both of these records so that their sum is representative of the committees’ actual transaction totals. Still, we add “Amended” or “Amendment” to those transaction descriptions.
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.