Thread by @JuddLegum

1. Spending the weekend cataloging corporate contributions to the politicians behind the abortion bans in six states.

Let's talk about how difficult they make it to access this info

2. Just for example, lets take Phil Bryant, the Governor of Mississippi who just signed a law banning abortion after 6 weeks.

A search that seems like it should work brings up Bryant Clark, who is not the right person

3. You have to search by "Candidate Committee" not "Candidate" to get Phil Bryant

But wait a second -- it only pulls up two reports. The last one is nearly 2 years old.

Where is the rest of the info?

4. As it turns out Bryant CLOSED his campaign account in 2017 and funneled all the money to a new PAC that he controls.

But that still doesn't explain where the pre-2017 filings are

5. After some search, I realize Bryant's pre-2017 filings are available under a separate tab with an entirely different search interface

6. That generates a list of PDF documents which are not searchable and a oriented the wrong way.

But flip them around and you'll find that @ATT donated $15,000 to Phil Bryant in 2015, which is exactly the information that I'm looking for

7. If you think this work is important, please subscribe to my newsletter, Popular Information.

I spend the time it takes to follow the money.

Sign up at popular.info

8. To get the data I need, I need to repeat this process for the other legislative leaders in Mississippi and then the five other states that passed abortion bans each year.

Each state has a completely different interface and system for reporting results

9. The complications are endless. Mississippi, for example, allows separate corporate contributions from a Federal PAC, a state PAC and the corporate itself.

10. Tate Reeves, the current Lt. Gov who is running to be the next Governor of Mississippi, filed his campaign finance report as an unsearchable 213 page PDF

11. Nice try @pfizer but I found your $1000 contribution to Reeves anyway

@pfizer 12. Page 96 of Reeves campaign finance report contains a $300 donation from "Anonymous 2018"

WTF

(88 more pages to go)

@pfizer 13. $2500 contribution from @walmart to Reeves appears on page 133

@pfizer @Walmart 14. Mississippi Senate President Pro Tem Terry Burton's campaign finance report is (partially) hand-written!

15. Burton's report covering the contributions he received in 2018 appears to be completely missing from the database. This could be Burton's fault for not submitting the report or the state could have forgotten to upload it. Or the search could be broken.

@pfizer @Walmart 15. Lyft donated $500 to Ohio Speaker Ryan Smith, who just helped pass a near-total abortion ban