Data Acquisition
The New York State Board of Elections (SBoE) provides access to campaign finance reports in two ways:
- Website – The New York SBoE provides several search interfaces, listed on the linked website. The search results are report and transaction-centric. While cross-report browsing is not supported, there are some options to search for transactions by contributor information. There are also options to download search results and individual reports as CSVs.
- Bulk CSV Downloads – New York provides comma-separated-value (CSV) files for various records, including filers and transactions. The transaction files contain contributions, expenditures, and loans, together.
Transparency USA downloads and imports the bulk CSV files. It’s worth noting that we often found discrepancies in the website’s report summaries and the CSV versions of the data — both the bulk downloads and the individual report downloads — especially with regard to expenditures. The bulk downloads and individual report downloads did appear to be in agreement, so we believe this is an error in the website’s report summary. However, because of these discrepancies, and the difficulties they cause with validation, we have opted not to attempt any of the duplicate transaction cleanup we perform in other states. If you have a particular interest in any of the data you find on Transparency USA, we recommend you verify it with the state’s website.
Reported Data
Transparency USA processes two types of CSVs from New York, split up into five total files:
- A list of filers
- Transitions from county candidates
- Transactions from county committees
- Transactions from state candidates, and
- Transactions from state committees.
These records represent the candidates and committees registered to file campaign finance reports with the state.
Transparency USA imports all these records because they are the basis for transactional filing.
Transactions
Transparency USA imports all transactional data from these files, but some records represent non-transactional data. Based on the reporting “schedule” (report section), we split the transactions into contribution, expenditure, and loans sections of the Transparency USA website.
These are the schedules and how they are allocated by Transparency USA.
Contributions
- A – Monetary Contributions Received From Ind. & Part.
- B – Monetary Contributions Received From Corporation
- C – Monetary Contributions Received From All Other
- D – In-Kind (Non-Monetary) Contributions Received
- E – Other Receipts Received
- G – Transfers In
- L – Expenditure Refunds (Increases Balance)
- P – Non-Campaign Housekeeping Receipts
Expenditures
- F – Expenditures/ Payments
- H – Transfers Out
- J – Loan Repayments
- M – Contributions Refunded (Decreases Balance)
- Q – Non-Campaign Housekeeping Expenses
- T – Qualified Expenditures
Loans
- I – Loans Received
Not Imported
- K – Liabilities/Loans Forgiven
- N – Outstanding Liabilities/Loans
- O – LLCs/Partnership/Subcontractor
- R – Expense Allocation Among Candidates
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.