FEC Campaign Finance Filing Parser

Turn raw U.S. Federal Election Commission electronic filings into clean, structured JSON you can drop straight into a database, spreadsheet, or analytics pipeline. Give the actor one or more filing IDs and it returns a header / summary record plus every itemized contribution, disbursement, or loan row contained in the filing.

What it does

• Fetches the raw .fec document for each filing ID you supply from the FEC's public electronic-filings index.
• Parses the filing's fixed-format text into typed Python objects.
• Splits the result into:
  • One filing header record (filer name, committee ID, period covered, totals, etc.).
  • One itemized row record for each Schedule A / B / C / D / E line item, tagged with its schedule bucket.
• Pushes every record to the actor's default dataset.

Inputs

Field	Type	Default	Description
filingIds	array of string / integer	required	FEC electronic filing IDs to download and parse, e.g. ["1666999"].
includeItemizedRows	boolean	true	If false, only the filing header / summary is returned.
maxRowsPerFiling	integer	10000	Cap on itemized rows returned per filing. Large filings can contain 100,000+ rows.

Example input

{
  "filingIds": ["1666999"],
  "includeItemizedRows": true,
  "maxRowsPerFiling": 10000
}

Output

Every record is pushed to the default dataset and tagged with a record_type of either filing_header or itemized_row.

Sample header record

{
  "record_type": "filing_header",
  "filing_id": "1666999",
  "source_url": "https://docquery.fec.gov/dcdev/posted/1666999.fec",
  "data": {
    "header": {
      "record_type": "HDR",
      "ef_type": "FEC",
      "fec_version": "8.4",
      "soft_name": "...",
      "report_id": "..."
    },
    "filer_committee_id_number": "C00000000",
    "committee_name": "EXAMPLE FOR CONGRESS",
    "form_type": "F3",
    "coverage_from_date": "2024-01-01",
    "coverage_through_date": "2024-03-31",
    "total_receipts_period": 123456.78
  }
}

Sample itemized row record

{
  "record_type": "itemized_row",
  "filing_id": "1666999",
  "schedule": "Schedule A",
  "row_index": 0,
  "data": {
    "form_type": "SA11AI",
    "filer_committee_id_number": "C00000000",
    "contributor_last_name": "Smith",
    "contributor_first_name": "Jane",
    "contributor_city": "Austin",
    "contributor_state": "TX",
    "contribution_date": "2024-02-14",
    "contribution_amount": 250.0,
    "contribution_aggregate": 750.0,
    "contributor_employer": "Acme Corp",
    "contributor_occupation": "Engineer"
  }
}

The exact fields available depend on the form type (F3, F3X, F24, etc.) and the schedule (A = receipts, B = disbursements, C = loans, D = debts, E = independent expenditures).

Limitations

• The FEC's public document host can be slow or temporarily unavailable; failed fetches are logged and skipped without aborting the run.
• Very large filings (50,000+ itemizations) are split into thousands of dataset records — raise maxRowsPerFiling if you need the full extract.
• Only electronic filings are supported. Paper-filed reports do not have a raw .fec document and cannot be parsed.
• Field names follow the FEC's published form schemas. See fec.gov filing types for the canonical column dictionary.