By Earl F Glynn | Franklin Center

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

The analysis follows a description of some bad data records that were identified and fixed by the FEC in their online system.

The 18,794 itemized contributions in 2004-2005 from 15,680 individuals or corporations totaled about $42.8 million, which was nearly 100% of the total reported contributions.

The median aggregate contribution from individuals/corporations was about $316.  Analysis suggests 999 contributions of $1,460 of more were statistical “outliers”. 

There were 226 aggregate contributions of $50,000 or more.  The largest single contributor was Boone Pickens from Dallas, TX, who gave a total of $500,000 in two $250,000 donations.

There were 1,161 refunds to 577 persons/corporations that totaled $484,414.

Refunds ranged from $1 to $51,360.  There were 141 refunds of $100 or less but seven refunds were for $10,000 or more.  Only one refund was more than $50,000.

Any comparison to the 2013 Inauguration will not be possible until the FEC filing scheduled to be in late April.

Comparisons of Inauguration Contribution Records

Comparing the contribution records between President Obama’s first inauguration in 2009 with President Bush’s first inauguration in 2001 is probably the best comparison. But background research showed that the FEC only captured inauguration contributions starting in 2005 — there are no records from 2001 to study.

Likewise, comparing contributions between second inaugurations (2005 and 2013) is probably the best comparison.   This will be possible in about 90 days when the 2013 inauguration records are available from the FEC.

I wanted to start my analysis of inauguration contributions with the 2005 data, but quickly ran into problems.

The extra $20+ million records from 2005

My earlier article, Inaugural Committee Data Available from FEC Candidate and Committee Viewer,  showed how to find the inaugural committees.

Using the FEC Viewer I took a quick look at the donations and refunds for committee C00409011, the 55th Presidential Inaugural Committee.

Somewhat by chance, I sorted the Amount column to look at the largest and smallest donations and refunds.  Without any statistical analysis I knew four of the records were completely wrong because they were either unbelievable or  inconsistent with the reported $485 in total refunds:

One $20 million contribution to the 55th Presidential Inaugural Committee shown online on Jan. 15 was in error.

A $20 million contribution from an Iowa county Democratic Party to the inauguration of a Republican president was not possible.

Three $20 million refunds from the 55th Presidential Inaugural Committee were not possible when the reported total of all refunds was $485,000.

On Tuesday I sent an E-mail to the FEC Press Office asking for comments.

After a delay due to a computer problem, on Friday FEC spokesperson Christian Hilland replied:  “This problem has been fixed. There was an error in our database that incorrectly linked the transactions … to the wrong committee.“

With these four errors fixed, the following analysis does not need any handwaving to  ignore the wrong records.

Analysis of 55th Presidential Inaugural Committee Records

The starting point is to use the FEC Candidate and Committee Viewer to look at committee, C00409011, the 55th Presidential Inaugural Committee.

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 “2006″ even though the data are from 2004 and 2005.

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”:

Note:  the names in the list are sorted in alphabetical order, but the first name is “0′Keefe” with a zero instead of an “oh”.

This list of almost 19,000 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 ($1) and largest ($288,000) donations.  [Note the erroneous $20 million donation record has been deleted.]

As shown later under “Filings” the 2005 inaugural committee report was a paper filing – there was no electronic filing.

For years the FEC has used data entry to create files with campaign information from paper filings.  The electronic filings of the last decade or so have eliminated data entry by the FEC since the electronic filings directly report the data.

Details of donations and refunds can be downloaded from this tabsheet under export options.

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 file containing “donations accepted” and “donations refunded” to look at the details in Excel — and for more analysis in R described below. 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 files have some additional fields, like the “Image Number” in the FEC imaging system for paper filings.

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

Summary of Itemized Donations and Refunds
Reported by the 55th Presidential Inaugural Committee

See below for additional analysis of the data.

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 first link under “Total Donations Accepted,” two entries are shown that sum to $50,000.  That amount does explain the difference between the totals for the first and second “Total Donation Accepted” links.

The link on the $42,740,021 “Total Donations Accepted” shows 18,792 donations, but the detail records sum to $42,738,224.

The first link under “Total Donations Refunded” shows 15 refunds that sum to $3,638.  Five of these “refunds” are negative numbers.  Apparently, there were five refunds that were incorrect, and these negative amounts “cancel” those refunds.

The link on the $481,301 “Total Donations Refunded” shows 1,146 refunds that sum to $480,776.

It’s unclear what the relationship is between the amounts in the links and the amounts from the totals for the detail records that can be downloaded via the links.

Filings

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

The only View/Download option above is “PDF” since the filings were made on paper and were not electronic filings.

Analysis of FEC records using R Script

The FEC used data entry of the paper filings to create online data for analysis.  The “Two-Year Summary” section above described the download of CSV files containing donation and refund data.

I wrote an inaug05.R script to analyze these CSV files.  As much as possible this script paralleled the analysis of the 2009 inaugural data, but there were limitations because the data were from a paper filing and not an electronic filing.

Data used by the inaug05.R script did not have street information for the contributors.  Because of that computing contributions aggregated to a particular street address was not possible, like it was with the electronic filing data processed by the inaug09.R script.

Contributions

The 55th Presidential Inaugural Committee (2005)  itemized almost all contributions even ones that were below the $200 mandatory reporting level.  To facilitate comparison with the 2009 contributions, separate contribution levels above and below $201 were introduced.

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Summary of Individual Contribution Levels in Itemized Contributions

As shown in the table above, there were 226 contributors giving $50,000 or more that totaled almost $32 million, which was almost 75% of the donations.

See Google Map:  Large Donors to Presidential Inaugural 2005.

R shows the quantiles (see below) with half the contributions less than $316. About 90% of the contributions were $1,100 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%
   210    300    316    566   1100   4200  25300 100000 500000

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

Boxplot of contributions by persons/corporations in Inauguration 2005. Contributions above $1,460 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 1,161 refunds to 577 persons/corporations that totaled $484,414.

Refunds ranged from $1 to $51,360.  There were 141 refunds of $100 or less but seven refunds were for $10,000 or more.  Only one refund was more than $50,000.

Analysis Results Files (tab delimited)

• Donations:  By contributor (person/corporation)
• Refunds:  By contributor (person/corporation)

Related

• Inaugural Committee Data Available from FEC Candidate and Committee Viewer, WatchdogLabs, Jan. 16, 2013.
• Analysis of FEC Presidential Inaugural Committee 2009 records, WatchdogLabs, Jan. 18, 2013.
• Google Map: Large Donors to Presidential Inaugural 2009, WatchdogLabs, Jan. 19, 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 files (to appear)
• Searching all FEC electronic files without a database (to appear)

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