Money showered on politicians and elected officials by special interests is found on the Secretary of State’s website either in individual reports filed by elected or appointed officials, or in spreadsheets with tens of thousands of data points.
A project of New Mexico In Depth, New Mexico Money Trail aims to make it easier for you to "follow the money."
You’ll find campaign contributions and expenditures reported to the Secretary of State by elected officials, candidates, and political action committees.
You can search by name – candidates, committees, or contributors – in the search bar. Or click on names you see in lists on the site – on the home page, or under the contributions, people or committees tabs.
On individual candidate or committee pages there are visualizations showing their most recent cash flow, as well as trends over time. And from those pages you can download their donations and expenditures.
You can also download complete datasets showing aggregated contributions or expenditures for all candidates and committees.
We’ve also created easy-to-search financial disclosure spreadsheets filed by candidates, elected and appointed officials, and those who run state agencies - all of whom are required to report personal financial information under state law. Currently, you can only access this information in individual PDF forms found through the Secretary of State’s Campaign Finance Information System.
Pulling all of that information into spreadsheets allows you to more easily understand the big picture of the financial interests exerting influence on the people serving in the highest echelons of state government.
You can search by employer, income and business interests, lobbyist relatives, Board affiliations, and other required information – shedding light on potential conflicts of interest.
Datamade, a civic technology company in Chicago, developed and maintains this site for New Mexico In Depth, using data reported to the New Mexico Secretary of State. (To follow the money in federal races, go to the Federal Election Commission portal, or to the national nonprofit, Open Secrets. For larger cities in New Mexico that maintain their own campaign finance systems, visit their websites. For state data prior to mid-2020, go here.)
DataMade supports partners in working toward democracy, justice, and equity, writing on their website: "At DataMade, we understand that data can be easy to come by, but difficult to make sense of. We transform complex data into clear, appealing, and actionable websites.”
The site updates automatically every night, making available new information the day after you can find it on the Secretary of State’s website.
Most of the data is reported under filing deadlines mandated by state law. But the data on this site will also update when officials amend reports already filed.
The data spans mid-2020 through today. There is a spreadsheet you can download with campaign data prior to mid-2020.
Resources:
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