Project status: archived.

Methodology

Dark Money Tracker was built around public campaign finance records, automated processing, visual reporting, and AI-assisted analysis. The notes below describe the original project methodology and the archive process.

Original Data Sources

The reports were based on publicly available Federal Election Commission data. The application documentation and preserved reports refer to candidate filings, committee filings, contribution records, disbursement records, independent expenditure records, and public campaign finance identifiers.

Original Report Workflow

• Collect and normalize public campaign finance data.
• Analyze fundraising, disbursements, transfers, vendors, donor-field completeness, refunds, and other report-specific patterns.
• Generate charts, tables, narrative sections, HTML reports, and PDFs.
• Publish report metadata through the backend and rendered artifacts through S3.

Archive Workflow

The archive exporter reads the public report index from the existing application API, then downloads the public teaser HTML, report PDFs, candidate images, thumbnails, chart images, and report styles from the public S3 artifact paths referenced by those report records.

The static site renders the preserved report metadata from /assets/data/reports-index.json and embeds local report HTML from /public/reports/. No report facts or statistics were manually recreated for the archive pages.

Limitations

The archive preserves the public report presentation available at export time. It does not recalculate report statistics, refresh FEC data, publish private full-report fulfillment records, or reconstruct unavailable content by guessing.