Illinois Sunshine is a tool for browsing political contributions in the state of Illinois.
The data comes from the Illinois State Board of Elections, which has been collecting this data electronically since 1994. We built Illinois Sunshine to give journalists, activists and citizens better access to this data.
Who has to report campaign finance?
Any political committee that exceeds $5,000 in either receipts or expenditures over the period of a year (this is the filing threshold). Once a committee exceeds the filing threshold, they are covered by the Illinois Campaign Disclosure Act (PDF) and are required to report contributions and expenditures accordingly.
How is campaign finance disclosed?
The following are campaign disclosure forms required under the Illinois Campaign Disclosure Act:
Data quality
We make available all raw candidate, committee and contribution data from the Illinois State Board of Elections. However, prior to July 1999, when electronic filing was introduced, much of the data is incorrect or missing. Keep this in mind when working with the data.
