- COMPLIANCE HELP CENTER
- Troubleshooting
- Contribution FAQs
TROUBLESHOOTING
Contribution FAQs
Contribution FAQs
- Why doesn’t a contribution I made appear in the platform? Political campaigns file their financial disclosure reports on predetermined schedules that vary by jurisdiction. When a report is filed, the election authority in a given jurisdiction will work on its own unique schedule to post the contributions in the report to its online portal, where illumis tracks the data and posts it to your account in real-time. It can take weeks or months depending on the timing of contributions and filing deadlines for a contribution to appear in your Dashboard. For example, a contribution made to a presidential candidate in January gets filed at the end of the quarter and won’t appear in your account until April.
- How can I learn more about a contribution that was made to a PAC? Election authorities in different jurisdictions will handle PACs in different ways, but you can typically look up the specific committee at the source level to see the different campaigns that they have contributed to. Click on the date field of the contribution in question to go to the source, or if the direct link isn’t available, click Verify at Source to go to the source and review details about an individual political action committee. For some sources, like the FEC, you can also click on the recipient’s name to open the committee’s page.
- What does it mean when a contribution was amended? Campaigns will often file amended financial disclosure reports to account for mistakes or make other changes to previous filings. The platform notes contributions from amended filings because there will more than likely be a duplicate contribution from the original filing submitted to the election authority in that jurisdiction. The amended field allows you to distinguish between the two otherwise identical contribution records representing the same donation.
- What does it mean when I see “(ActBlue)” in a recipient field? Conduit PACs like ActBlue are registered political action committees that serve as payment processors for local, state, or federal political campaigns. Conduit PACs will usually file separate financial disclosure reports from the political campaigns that are actually receiving the contributions made via their platform. For this reason, when a person you’re monitoring in illumis makes a contribution to a campaign via a Conduit PAC like ActBlue, you will almost always see the contribution appear twice, and illumis will mark the ActBlue contribution with “(ActBlue)” in the recipient field to denote this. Other popular Conduit PACs include WinRed and SwingLeft, among others.