Campaign finance data for the 2020 Chatham County District Attorney and County Commission Chairman Races

You’ll find a searchable Google Spreadsheet with multiple worksheets here. The original PDF campaign finance filings that we downloaded from the Georgia Campaign Finance Commission’s website can be found here.

Background: 

We did not have time to do data entry for all of the 2020 races. We chose these two because they are countywide. We would have liked to do the Coroner’s race as well, but those filings were not available online at the time.

Data entry was done by volunteers/concerned citizens Chelsey Beck, Tracy Brisson, Carmen Evans, Jennifer Lawver, Michelle Pompei, Michelle Solomon, and Jennifer West. There may be errors as it was done by hand – you can check the original PDFs for accuracy. While data entry errors are possible, where information is missing it is almost always because forms were incomplete.

We chose to highlight combined donations to any candidate of $1,000 and higher and added some information from the Georgia Secretary of State’s Corporations Division website about businesses whose names we did not recognize. You can search that website yourself for the officers and registered agents of any Georgia business. On the Notable Donations tab we noted combined donations from the same business interest as determined by shared employer, shared address, or controlling information found on the Dept. of Corporations website. Though we tried to be careful, this is necessarily somewhat subjective and may have errors so we recommend doing your own research.

Candidates’ campaign finance filings are legally required to be made public. Though municipalities don’t have to host the data online or in searchable format, we believe that is best practice. 

THE MAXIMUM LEGAL DONATION FROM ANY INDIVIDUAL OR BUSINESS TO ANY CANDIDATE WAS $2,800 PER ELECTION CYCLE IN 2020. NOT PER YEAR. THE PRIMARY AND THE GENERAL ARE CONSIDERED DIFFERENT ELECTION CYCLES.