US elections and campaign finance, explained
An independent reference on how federal elections are run, how results are certified and how money in politics is reported. Not a government agency: it keeps no official records and certifies nothing.
This is an independent reference about how elections work in the United States and how money moving through political campaigns is reported. It is not a government agency, it holds no official record, and nothing here certifies anything. Its purpose is narrower and more practical: to explain the vocabulary, document types and numbering conventions that anyone runs into the first time they try to read American election data.
Why this material is hard to read
Elections in the United States are administered locally. Counties and municipalities run polling places and count ballots, state election officials aggregate and certify the totals, and federal compilations are assembled only afterwards, from what the states have already certified. There is no single national ballot and no single national count, even in a presidential year. That decentralization is the reason a page of federal election results looks the way it does: it is a compilation of many separate state certifications, laid out in a common format so they can be compared.
Campaign finance data follows a different path. Federal candidates and political committees file periodic disclosure reports themselves, on standard forms, according to a published calendar. Those filings are the raw material behind almost every figure quoted about fundraising in a federal race.
What the sections cover
- Election results. How certified totals are organized by cycle, by state and by office; what a general election table contains and how a primary table differs from it.
- Candidate lists. How a person becomes a filed federal candidate, and why the list of filers is always longer than the list of names on any ballot.
- Campaign finance filings. Reporting periods, the main disclosure forms, and what committee identifiers mean.
- Committees and advisory opinions. What a political committee is in the legal sense, and what an advisory opinion is as a document.
How the addresses are built
Many pages here are organized by a short cycle code: a two- or four-digit year followed by an abbreviation for the type of election. GEN means a general election, PRI a primary, PPR a presidential primary. Within a cycle, individual pages are usually numbered rather than named, using a fixed-width numeric code in which the leading digits identify a state and the remaining digits identify a district, an office or a summary sheet. Zeros in the trailing positions normally mean "statewide" rather than "district-level". Once that pattern is clear, most of the directory becomes navigable without a search box.
What this site is not
It is not the Federal Election Commission and is not affiliated with it. Official certified results, official candidate filings and the authoritative campaign finance database are published by the FEC and by state election authorities; where a number matters legally or journalistically, it should be taken from those sources rather than from an explanatory page. Nothing here should be read as legal advice about registration, reporting deadlines or ballot access.
What this site does offer is the layer that official sources rarely include: an explanation of what each kind of document is for, who produces it, when it appears, and what its columns actually mean. Start with whichever cycle or filing period you were looking for, and the surrounding conventions will explain themselves.
Where the official data lives
This site explains how the records are structured; the records themselves are published by the agencies that collect them. Federal campaign finance filings and certified federal election results come from the Federal Election Commission. Statutes and regulations behind the filing calendar are published in the Code of Federal Regulations. Historical election records are held by the National Archives.
Abbreviations used in these file names
| Code | Stands for | Appears in |
|---|---|---|
| GEN | general election | November federal elections |
| PRI | primary election | state nominating contests |
| PPR | presidential primary | presidential nominating season |
| CENR | certified election results | compiled state certifications |
| CANDLIST | candidate list | registered federal filers |