By Earl F Glynn | Franklin Center

This article reviews information available online and in FEC data files from records filed by the Presidential Inaugural Committee 2009, and parallels similar analysis of records filed by the 55th Presidential Inaugural Committee in 2005. 

The 20,960 contributions in 2008-2009 from 14,666 individuals at 13,733 distinct addresses totaled more than $47 million. The total reported contributions were over $54 million.

The median individual aggregate contribution was about $360.  Analysis suggests 1,333 contributions by individuals of $5,400 or more are statistical “outliers”. 

There were 538 people contributing from 444 addresses with aggregate donations of $50,000 or more.  The largest contribution from a single address was in New York City where George Soros and four family members donated a total of $250,000.

The largest single aggregate contribution of $155,000 was from, and the largest single aggregate refund of $155,000 was to, a Silver Spring, MD address where an individual wrote four checks that were labeled in an FEC file as “not sufficient funds / bounced check.”

Analysis shows the unitemized contributions of nearly $7 million likely came from over 34,000 contributions of $200 or less. 

There were 225 refunds to 136 individuals that totaled slightly more than $1 million and ranged from $25 to $155,000.

Six refunds were $100 or less, but 32 were $10,000 or more.  There were eight $50,000 refunds.  The median refund amount was $1,800.

Any comparison to the contributions to the inauguration on Monday will not be possible until the FEC filing by the Presidential Inaugural Committee 2013 scheduled to be in late April.

My recent posting showed how to use the relatively new FEC Candidate and Committee Viewer to search for inaugural committee information, and then inspect or download data.

To start the analysis of the 2009 inaugural committee data, let’s search for committee C00458166 using the FEC Viewer.

The details for any committee is broken into three tabsheets:  Two-Year Summary, Report Summaries, and Filings.

The “Two-Year Period” dropdown menu is appropriate for congressional campaign reporting, but makes little sense here.   The only selection that is allowed is “2010″ even though the data are from 2008 and 2009.

The following committee information is shown with all three summary tabsheets:

Let’s review what information is available in each tabsheet.

Two-Year Summary

The default display shows a “Two-Year Summary” tabsheet when a committee is selected, even though for inaugural committees this terminology does not make sense.

This tabsheet shows aggregate donations and refunds for the entire duration of the inaugural committee.

Click on “Total Donations Accepted” or “Total Donations Refunded” links to view details.

For example, the first few donations are shown below from clicking on “Total Donations Accepted”:

This list of almost 21,000 donations can be viewed online, and can be sorted in different ways.  But because of the size of this file, sorting makes little sense except perhaps to see the smallest ($5) and largest ($100,000) donations.

The information in this online list shows much of the information contained in the data files from the legacy FEC paper filings.  However, there is some additional information about each entry in the FEC electronic filings, if available.

The FEC Viewer interface provides no filtering options, but the complete dataset can be downloaded in various formats, including XML, CSV, and JSON.

FEC File Export Options

I downloaded CSV files containing the “donations accepted” and “donations refunded” to look at the details in Excel. I wanted to add up all the itemized records to compare with the reported totals.

The downloaded CSV files contain the information shown in the online tables.  The file has some additional fields, like the “Image Number” in the FEC imaging system for paper filings.  This CSV file does not have all the information that is contained the file from the FEC electronic filing.

The table below shows the results of adding up all the detail records:

Summary of Itemized Donations and Refunds
Reported by Presidential Inaugural Committee 2009

[Note:  See below, but the sum of itemized contributions found in online files 425925.fec, 429146.fec, and 437296.fec is slightly higher than the info in the CSV file downloaded above:  $47,404,176.]

What is the explanation for the difference between the reported total and the total of the itemized records for donations?

Over 34,000 unitemized contributions

A July 2009 letter from the FEC asked the Inaugural Committee to explain the difference:

“Line 6 of the Summary Page of your report discloses a total of $54,227,423.93 in Total Donations Accepted. The sum of the entries itemized on Schedule 13-A, however, indicates the total to be $46,333,035. Please amend your report to clarify the discrepancy.”

The Committee replied in Aug 2009:

“The difference between the total of the itemized contributions and the amount showing on Line 6 is the amount of the unitemized donations to the Committee.”

This means the $6,877,504 unitemized amount came from contributions of $200 or less.

Simple arithmetic shows a minimum of 34,300 contributions of $200 would be required to account for this unitemized amount.

Report Summaries

This summary is useful to see the coverage by report date range, but I do not find the links very useful.

If one clicks on the three links to “Total Donations Accepted,” which all are nearly the same value,  one see no entries for the first link, one entry for the second link and 20,959 entries for the third link.  The detail records do not always explain the value shown in the table above.

Likewise with the “Total Donations Refunded” links, there are 3 entries for the first link, 21 entries for the second link, and 201 entries for the third.

Filings

This tabsheet summarizes all the filings made by a committee with the FEC.

The first two documents listed above are letters exchanged between the FEC and the Inaugural Committee about the large unitemized contributions mentioned earlier.

Some historical perspective may be useful in understanding the View/Download links at the right.

The “Page by Page” links and the PDF “View” links show FEC information from paper filings in the “old” FEC system.  For backward compatibility, images are created from the information from electronic filings when necessary.

As an example, see selected pages in this PDF showing the five $50,000 contributions by George Soros and his relatives to the 2009 Inaugural Committee.

The HTML “View” links show FEC information from electronic filings.

The data from electronic filings can be downloaded via the FEC-nnnnnn link, where nnnnnn is a number used in the filename, nnnnnn.fec.

The FEC Viewer allows download of FEC files in either CSV or ASCII formats.

CSV files use a comma as a field separator while “normal” ASCII FEC files use a x”1C” character as a separator. CSV FEC files are a bit larger than the ASCII versions because each field in a CSV file is enclosed in quotation marks (“).  For more details, see Working with FEC electronic filings (to appear).

FEC Disclosure Business Architect Paul C. Clark II, PhD confirmed in an E-mail on Tuesday that an amended electronic filing “is a complete replacement” for the original filing.  This means in the filings above, file 429146.fec is a replacement for file 414593.fec.  A file comparison tool could be used to identify differences between an original and an amended filing.

FEC files provide complete addresses including street, city and state.  The R analysis script below used these complete addresses to aggregate the data by individual contributor.

Analysis of FEC Eletronic Filings in R Script

The information from files 425925.fec, 429146.fec and 437296.fec must be combined to consider all donations and refunds.

I wrote an inaug09.R script to analyze these .fec files.  Additional details of how this script works are in the article, Working with FEC electronic filings (to appear).

Contributions

Results from the R script showed 20,960 contributions from 14,666 individuals at 13,733 distinct addresses totaled $47,404,175.68.

Individual contributions ranged from $201 to $155,000.  (The FEC requirement is to report all donations more than $200).

Summary of Individual Contribution Levels in Itemized Contributions

Supposedly, contributions by individuals were limited to $50,000 in 2009 according to a recent NPR news story, but the results show 56 contributors over that limit.

Supposedly, contributions in 2009 were limited to individuals but a review of the list shows some groups contributed:  The Poarch Creek Indians from Atmore, AL donated $50,000.  The Cherokee Nation Businesses LLC gave $50,000.  The San Manuel Band of Mission Indians gave $15,000.

As shown in the table above, there were 485 individuals giving $50,000 or more.  But when contributions at a single address were aggregated there were 538 people at 444 addresses with aggregate donations of $50,000 or more.

See Google Map:  Large Donors to Presidential Inaugural 2009 to explore donation addresses of $50K or higher.

R shows the quantiles (see below) with half the contributions less than $360.  About 75% of the contributions were  $1,000 or less:

> quantile(Donations.By.Person$Total, probs=c(0, 0.25, 0.50, 0.75, 0.90, 0.95, 0.98, 0.99, 1.00))
       0%       25%       50%       75%       90%       95%       98%       99%      100%
   200.94    324.50    359.50   1000.00   5000.00  25000.00  50000.00  50000.00 155000.00

The 98% and 99% quantile levels are both $50,000, since that was a common maximum contribution.

A boxplot of the base-10 logarithm of the 14,666 aggregate contributions from individuals shows that 1,333 contributions above $5,400 should be considered statistical outliers given the significant number of small contributions:

Boxplot of Individual Contributions in Inauguration 2009. Contributions of about $5,400 or more are “high” statistical outliers.

The boxplot shows the median is skewed to be very close to the 25% quantile.  Perhaps this is explained by the ticket price to attend certain inaugural events?

Refunds

The R script showed 225 refunds to 136 distinct addresses that totaled $1,035,640.09.

Individual refunds ranged from $25 to $155,000.  Six refunds to individuals were $100 or less but 32 individuals received refunds of $10,000 or more.  There were eight $50,000 refunds and one $155,000 refund.

Bounced checks?

Sabrina Williams, Silver Spring, MD, was the person reported with the largest aggregate individual contribution and receiving the largest aggregate refund.  Both amounts were $155,000.

Details buried in file 429146.fec showed that all of the refunds to Sabrina Williams were for “Not Sufficient Funds / Bounced Check.”  See this PDF file with additional information.

There were a total of nine bounced checks that counted as $198,500 of the contributions to the 2009 Inaugural.  William’s four checks were about 80% of the total of the bounced checks.

Analysis Results Files (tab-delimited):

• Donations:  Raw data   By person
• Refunds:  Raw data, By person

Related

• Obama inauguration sponsors spent millions influencing government, Center for Public Integrity, Jan. 18, 2013.
• Meet Sabrina Williams, who bounced $155,000 in checks to Obama’s 2009 inauguration, Watchdog.org, Jan. 18, 2013.

• Inaugural Committee Data Available from FEC Candidate and Committee Viewer, WatchdogLabs, Jan. 16, 2013.
• Google Map: Large Donors to Presidential Inaugural 2009, WatchdogLabs, Jan. 19, 2013.
• FEC removes four extra $20 million records from 2005 Inaugural Committee Report, WatchdogLabs, Jan. 21, 2013.
• Google Map: Large Donors to Presidential Inaugural 2005, WatchdogLabs, Jan. 21, 2013.
• Working with FEC electronic filings (to appear)
• Downloading and updating local copy of all FEC electronic filings (to appear)
• Searching all FEC electronic filings without a database (to appear)

Please, feel free to steal our stuff! Just remember to credit WatchdogLabs.org or the Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity.

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Contact Info: Email: Earl.Glynn@FranklinCenterHq.org, Twitter: @WatchdogLabs, Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/WatchdogLabs