Surplus Funds Expenditures: Washington State Candidate Spending

Surplus funds accounts, identified by an asterisk in the filer ID, track post-election spending by Washington State candidates for up to 10 years after their election. Records detail payments from these accounts as reported to the Public Disclosure Commission on forms C3, C4, and Schedule C. The dataset is a best-effort compilation that may contain incomplete or incorrect information, with original reports available for verification.

Use Cases

• Tracking post-election spending by specific candidates using `filer_name`, `filer_id`, and `election_year`.
• Analyzing expenditure patterns and recipient networks with `recipient_name`, `recipient_city`, `amount`, and `description`.
• Verifying reported expenditures against original PDC filings via the provided `url` and `report_number`.
• Distinguishing between itemized and aggregated transactions using the `itemized_or_non_itemized` column.

Strengths

• Covers a significant time span, containing data for the last 10 years of election cycles.
• Provides direct links to original source documents for verification via the `url` column.
• Includes a mechanism to correlate surplus accounts with standard candidate records via the asterisk in `filer_id`.

Limitations

• Metadata completeness is low: row count, size, license, and author are unknown across all sources.
• The data is described as a 'best-effort' compilation that may contain incomplete or incorrect information.
• Sources disagree on the 'last updated' date, with Socrata showing 2026-05-27 and Data.gov showing 2026-04-12.

Provenance

Source

Washington State Public Disclosure Commission (PDC)

Collection Method

Reported by candidates on forms C3, C4, Schedule C and their electronic filing equivalents.

Time Range

Last 10 years (determined by election year, not report year)

Freshness

Last updated date conflicts: Socrata reports 2026-05-27, Data.gov reports 2026-04-12.

Geography

Washington State, USA