Seeing Red, Feeling Blue: The Color of Donors’ Political Money

(I-Newswire) December 14, 2005 - For Immediate Release

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Joe Stuteville

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Seeing Red, Feeling Blue: The Color of Donors' Political Money

Student Project Puts ZIP into Identifying



BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Much has been said about campaign finance reform, particularly the disclosure of money candidates take in from corporations and special-interest groups. So how about a new tool that identifies individual donors and the candidates and political parties they back?

Matthew Kane, an Indiana University School of Informatics doctoral student, has devised a program that identifies donors, their addresses and the amounts they gave to candidates and the Republican and Democratic national committees during the 2004 presidential elections. That information can be accessed by the public on a Web site Kane has created.

The idea grew out of an assignment Kane received in a security class he was taking with Markus Jakobsson, Ph.D., associate professor and associate director of the IU Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research. The assignment was to extract information that people consider private, but actually is public record.

"Since I have a deep interest in politics, I knew that political campaign contributions were in the public domain and that some people would prefer to not have others know exactly what political contributions they had made," says Kane, who is pursuing doctorates in computer science and cognitive science. "Of course, what better way to make people aware of another's contributions than by mapping it?"

The donor information was extracted from the nonprofit Fundrace Project, an on-line resource that details and maps donors' information derived from records on file with the Federal Election Commission from the 2004 elections. Kane then used special programming language from open source libraries, but his main tool was Google Maps, a free resource from the search engine giant.

"However, since Google Maps only understands a latitude/longitude coordinate as input for a map marker, rather than just a plain address, I had to build my own geocoder," says Kane. "This turned out to be a very elaborate process, but the source for most of the raw information came from the U.S. Census Bureau's on-line files."

Here's how it works: Users simply go to the Kane's site where they are asked to enter a ZIP code. Within moments, a window pops up indicating the total number and percentages of Democrats and Republicans who are on record as having donated to the 2004 elections.

Below that information is a street map of the ZIP code area depicting red (Republican Party) and blue (Democratic Party) balloons. Clicking on a balloon brings up a window that includes a donor's name, address and the amount they gave to a particular candidate or one of the two major parties.

In Kane's view, the tool he created has a more practical use. It could be used by campaign strategists to know which ZIP codes or areas of a ZIP code are swing-vote areas that should receive attention versus those areas that are clearly Republican-dominated or Democrat-dominated."

Kane's Web site can be accessed at www.cs.indiana.edu/~markane/i590/contributors.html. For more information about the IU Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, go to http://cacr.iu.edu.

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About the Indiana University School of Informatics

The Indiana University School of Informatics offers a unique, interdisciplinary curriculum that focuses on developing specialized skills and knowledge of information technology. The School has a variety of undergraduate degrees and specialized master's and doctorate degrees in bioinformatics, chemical informatics, health informatics, human-computer interaction, laboratory informatics, new media and computer science. Each degree is an interdisciplinary endeavor that combines course work and field experiences from a traditional subject area or discipline with intensive study of information and technology. For more information, visit the School's Web sites:
www.informatics.indiana.edu

www.informatics.iupui.edu

www.informatics.iusb.edu

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