The California Secretary of State in coordination with non-profit MapLight has unveiled a new Power Search tool for accessing California campaign contributions. Power Search allows users to more readily review candidate and committee contributions and provides an easy interface for looking up individual contributors. The tool also allows users to search by contribution date range. Power Search is meant to supplement, not replace, the already existing Cal Access system. One note of caution: neither the new Power Search or existing Cal Access systems have undergone an extensive data clean-up so users need to be aware of the fact that neither system supports a smart search capability (i.e., a search for AT&T won’t find “AT T” or any other variations on a name.) Happy searching.
A view of the search options available through the Advanced Power Search interface.