AZ-Sunshine
Political transparency. Campaign finance + independent expenditures for AZ.
About This Project
AZ-Sunshine makes Arizona political spending transparent and searchable. It aggregates campaign finance data from the Arizona Secretary of State and presents it in a clean, searchable interface so voters can see who funds their representatives.
Features include candidate profiles, donor search, spending breakdowns by category, and timeline views of campaign finance activity. The goal is simple: sunlight as disinfectant.
The Problem
Independent Expenditures allow outside groups to have outsize influence in primaries, undercutting genuine ability of voters to choose representatives. Some information was available, but not in an effective format. Independent expenditure data, PAC contributions, lobbyist spending, and legislative votes existed in separate government databases — some behind clunky interfaces, some only in PDF format. Connecting the dots between who funds a candidate and how that candidate votes required hours of manual research across multiple state websites, and candidates who did choose to eschew IE funds did not receive appropriate recognition for this ethical stance.
Our Solution
We built AZ-Sunshine — a transparency platform that aggregates, visualizes, and analyzes political spending in Arizona elections. The system spiders the AZ Secretary of State’s Statements of Interest, downloads and normalizes the full Independent Expenditure database, and maps donor-to-PAC-to-candidate contribution flows. Public dashboards let anyone see total IE spending for or against candidates, track contribution chains, and (in later phases) correlate financial influence with legislative behavior.
This also includes ability to pledge not to take Independent Expenditures, a tracking system of which candidates have pledged, and a way for volunteers to spot dirty money advertising.
The Result
Working prototype with candidate tracking and IE spending dashboards. Automated data collection from AZ Secretary of State and seethemoney.az.gov. Donor and PAC relationship mapping by race and candidate. Designed for phased expansion: lobbyist data, vote correlation, financial disclosure parsing. Open source at github.com/Cooperation-org/Az-Sunshine.
What they say
"They took messy political data and turned it into something citizens can actually use."