Data Acquisition
The Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board (IECDB) provides access to campaign finance reports in two ways:
- IECDB Website – The Iowa IECDB website provides several interfaces for browsing campaign finance information, including committee searches for viewing complete filed reports and transaction searches for finding individual contributions and expenditures.
- Bulk CSV Downloads – Contributions, expenditures, independent expenditures, registered committees, and other state/federal committees can be downloaded in comma-separated-value (CSV) files.
Transparency USA downloads and imports the bulk CSV files.
Reported Data
Transparency USA processes four CSV file types – contributions, expenditures, registered committees, and other state/federal committees. However, we do not import independent expenditures because they lack the necessary committee identifiers to associate transactions with a specific committee for display on our website.
Committees
These records represent the candidates and committees registered to file campaign finance reports with the state. The state also provides a list of committees from other states as well as federal committees that file in Iowa.
Transparency USA imports all these records because they are the basis for transactional filing. However, the files provided by Iowa only contain currently “active” committees and exclude committees that have been “terminated.” Fortunately, the transaction files contain enough information about the filing committee for us to derive those missing from the provided committee files.
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 but do not include non-monetary, in-kind expenditures.
Transparency USA imports all data from these files.
Additional Information
The Iowa website displays more information than they make available in the downloaded CSV files, specifically:
- Reports/Cover Summaries, including Cash on Hand
- Contribution unique identifiers
- Expenditure unique identifiers
- Expenditure purpose
- Terminated Committee List
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.