Data Explanation for Wyoming
Data Acquisition
The Wyoming Secretary of State provides access to campaign finance reports through its Campaign Finance Information System (WTCFIS). They provide three search interfaces:
Transparency USA downloads the contribution and expenditure search results by two-year election cycle. Additionally, the reports are used to validate the accuracy of our final data after processing.
Reported Data
Contributions for All Committee Types
These records represent contributions made by all committee types – Candidates, candidate committees, organizations, and political parties.
Transparency USA imports all these records. Loans are included in this data, but Transparency USA moves those to our loans page, rather than displaying them as contributions.
Expenditures for All Committee Types
These records include all types of expenditures made by committees. Wyoming does not provide a transaction type like they do with contributions (monetary, in-kind, etc), but they do provide a purpose category, which Transparency USA includes in our description field for each transaction.
Reports
This search interface lists reports, available as PDFs, for all committees. Since they’re in PDF format, they aren’t useful to Transparency USA as a bulk data source, but they allow us to spot-check reported totals compared to what we have imported into our system.
A Note About Amendments
In many states, Transparency USA receives a finalized list of transactions after all amendments are accounted for.
In Wyoming, for both contributions and expenditures, the files Transparency USA downloads include separate individual records for originally filed transactions, transactions added via amendment, and transactions removed via amendment.
Due to the potential problems with trying to appropriately merge these transactions ourselves, we have decided not to. Instead, Transparency USA lists all transactions as they appear in the source data, but the amounts of deleted transactions are displayed as negative values so that they appropriately negate the original record, and correctly apply to the sum of contributions and expenditures.
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.