Project status: Dark Money Tracker is archived.

Dark Money Tracker

Campaign finance research, archived.

Dark Money Tracker was an experimental platform created by Shadow Network Intelligence to explore how AI and software engineering could make campaign finance research faster, more transparent, and easier to understand.

The project combined public Federal Election Commission data, automated data pipelines, AI-assisted analysis, and investigative research to produce detailed reports on political campaigns, fundraising, spending, vendors, and financial relationships.

Active development has concluded, but selected reports and information about the project remain available here.

Browse Archived Reports

Project Overview

What The Project Explored

Dark Money Tracker tested a research workflow for collecting public FEC data, normalizing campaign finance records, surfacing fundraising and expenditure patterns, and presenting findings through web reports and downloadable PDFs.

  • Automated ingestion and normalization of Federal Election Commission data
  • AI-assisted research and report generation with human review
  • Campaign fundraising, expenditure, vendor, and spending-network analysis
  • Public-interest political finance reporting with charts, tables, and source notes

Archived Reports

Selected Public Reports

These reports are preserved from the original public application using locally stored metadata, report HTML, PDFs, and chart assets.

View the full archive

Engineering Portfolio

Original And Archive Architecture

The original interactive application used static HTML, Netlify Functions, a FastAPI backend, PostgreSQL report records, S3-hosted rendered reports, Stripe checkout, and email automation for delivery.

The archive version is intentionally simpler: Netlify serves static pages, local JSON metadata, local report HTML, local PDFs, and local images. No backend, database, authentication, checkout, or runtime API server is required.

Original stack

FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, PostgreSQL, Netlify Functions, S3, Stripe, static HTML/CSS/JavaScript, report-generation pipelines.

Archive stack

Static Netlify hosting, local JSON data, preserved HTML/PDF report artifacts, accessible static navigation, and deterministic export tooling.

About Shadow Network Intelligence

Shadow Network Intelligence developed AI-assisted systems for investigative research, public-data analysis, and decision support. Dark Money Tracker was an application of that broader technology and research approach.