DemocratsPittsford.org

I have been doing some research using the New York State Board of Elections campaign finance database available through the link http://www.elections.state.ny.us/DisclosureReports.html# .

If you want to roll your own, the link http://www.elections.state.ny.us/CFDownloads.html leads to the full database downloads by filing period. Looking up the filer’s account numbers you want and doing some database work, you can really find out a lot.

Although I can do it and have done it in the past, I’m lazy and have been sticking to the disclosure reports recently.

As an exercise, I looked up contributions by ‘Christa’, uploaded it as both html and text to my machine and then started to work in a spreadsheet.

Stripping everything away but filings by Christa Construction, Christa Development and David Christa with addresses either of Victor, Fairport or Williamsville (Christa Construction apparently has an office there)  leads to some interesting data.

Here are the yearly totals:

Beginning in with July 2006, all local campaigns had to file through the State Board of Elections so it is not a surprise that the amounts jump in 2006.

Here are all the Christa contributions as of August 3, 2009 since the online system started in 1999 sorted by recipient and then date:

Judge for yourself how evenly split between Democrats and Republicans Christa entities make their contributions.

According to the New York State Board of Elections page http://www.elections.state.ny.us/Contributions.html :

The New York State Election Law places aggregate calendar year limits on the amount of political contributions that can be made by individuals and corporations to New York State candidates and committees, as follows:

• An individual may contribute up to a total of $150,000.00 in a calendar year.
• A corporation may contribute up to a total of $5,000.00 in a calendar year.
• Each affiliated or subsidiary corporation, if a separate legal entity, has its own limit.

Note that the table above covers several different entities and people so in order to see if these limits have been violated, you need to go back to the original page and total the individual entities up for each year. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

How much in consultations and contracts has Christa entities gotten during this period? I have no idea.

Of course, correlation is not causation – but I’m suspicious.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 3rd, 2009 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Monroe County, Pittsford. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.