Corrections Log
Every material data error we've found and fixed, in our own words. See our Editorial & Methodology page for how we source and compute figures in the first place.
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AIPAC PAC funding total corrected -- was undercounted 12x
AIPAC, NORPAC, the Republican Jewish Coalition PAC, Club for Growth, the National Association of Realtors, and the House Freedom Fund PAC were each fragmented across multiple contributor-name variants in FEC data (e.g. "AIPAC PAC" vs. "AMERICAN ISRAEL PUBLIC AFFAIRS COMMITTEE PAC EARMARKS" vs. "AIPAC PAC CONDUIT ACCOUNT") -- the same real money, split into separate database rows that our PAC dossier and Top PACs rankings summed independently rather than together.
What changed: AIPAC PAC's own dossier page was showing $42,267 when the true total was $505,833 -- a 12x undercount. Corrected by building a name-alias consolidation table and rewriting the PAC ranking and dossier queries to fold real variants together while continuing to exclude genuine payment-processing conduits (WinRed, ActBlue, and similar) as a separate, correctly-excluded category.
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2024-cycle independent expenditures corrected after cycle-mislabeling bug
While adding 2024 campaign-cycle data alongside existing 2026 data, found that the ingestion pipeline was hardcoding cycle=2026 on every independent-expenditure row regardless of which cycle was actually being fetched -- a leftover from when this pipeline only ever touched the 2026 cycle.
What changed: 1,396 real 2024-cycle independent-expenditure records were mislabeled as 2026 data. Caught before any of it was published or shown on the site -- deleted and reprocessed correctly from already-cached data before going live. Separately confirmed that every previously published funding figure (Florida, California, Texas, New York rankings) was unaffected, since those ran before 2024 data existed at all.
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Three wrong-person matches corrected in politician funding records
Cross-checked every tracked U.S. House member against Congress.gov's current-member list by state, district, and name. Found that an earlier version of the FEC name-matching process had silently linked three politician profiles to the wrong real person: a "Carter, John" record listed at NC-01 (the real John Carter represents TX-31), a "Fallon, Patrick" record listed at PA-10 (the real Pat Fallon represents TX-4), and a "McCauley, Gregory Michael" record at PA-06 that had absorbed data belonging to Rep. Michael McCaul (TX-10).
What changed: All three incorrect records were deleted (none had contribution or spending data attached, so nothing public was misattributed) and the correct politician was re-onboarded with verified data. Also corrected 10 additional cases where a politician's district number was simply outdated after redistricting, and fixed two name-formatting errors from special characters.
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Duplicate contribution records removed
A data-integrity check ahead of adding safe refresh logic found that some contribution records had been inserted more than once -- 70 duplicate rows across at least 60 distinct combinations of politician, contributor, amount, and date, some appearing 3-4 times.
What changed: This had been silently inflating some funding totals. Cleaned up (1,320 to 1,250 rows) and a database constraint now prevents the same contribution from being recorded twice going forward. The one previously reported figure most likely to be affected (a specific AIPAC contribution amount) was individually re-verified and confirmed accurate.
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Self-funding and payment-processing conduits excluded from funder rankings
Early funding-source rankings were treating a candidate's own joint fundraising committee, and third-party payment processors like WinRed, as if they were outside funders influencing that candidate -- rather than the candidate's own money passing through a processing service.
What changed: Rankings now automatically exclude a candidate's own affiliated committees (pulled directly from FEC's own candidate record, not hand-maintained) and known payment-processing conduits, so "top funders" reflects real outside contributors only.