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Our data collection process


General information about data entry

In general, the data presented here is available to the public on sheets of paper in the Portland City Clerk's Office. This is in City Hall, 389 Congress Street, Room 203. The data is not available in electronic form, although you can pay $1/page to get a photocopy.

Thus, we are largely dependent on volunteers to type in data.

The original data includes names and addresses of donors. As a group, we spent a lot of time talking about what info we should be asking volunteers to type in and the problem of making data that is publicly available in an awkward form available in a readily usable form. The group decided to avoid making individual names and addresses of donors more available than they already are, e.g., the typing process is onerous, but we don't want marketers to have ready access to individual's info. Therefore, in our hand-typing process, we are not entering it.


For the July 2019 reports:

  1. Portland Press Herald article on July semi-annual reporting for mayoral candidates
    (includes PDFs of the mayoral candidates filings)
  2. This was supplemented by cellphone pictures of all candidates' filings for the July 15, 2019 deadline
  3. Candidates were also asked to submit their spreadsheets to us directly; only Kate Snyder provided a spreadsheet.
  4. Volunteers hand-entered data from the PDFs (and from the images, when the PDFs were lacking).


To add to this page:

  1. We should provide links to the photos and to the csv files we created.