Methodology
How public filing records become research views
PubSys CalAccess is an independent research interface derived from California Secretary of State records. The official filing remains the source of record. These rules describe what a displayed total means and where interpretation can fail.
Source and data flow
The transaction pipeline ingests the Secretary of State's public CalAccess tab-delimited extracts, preserves the raw fields, normalizes typed staging records, and builds read-optimized tables for this UI. Public CalAccess pages may be reviewed to supply candidate, committee, or ballot-measure context that is not sufficiently represented in a raw extract. Raw records, reviewed entity context, and derived serving tables remain distinct so each claim can be traced to its source path.
Receipts and loans
Receipt totals combine reported Form 460 receipt rows from schedules A and C with loan rows from schedules B1, B2, and B3. Amounts retain their reported sign after latest-amendment selection and transaction deduplication. A label such as “raised” or “receipts” therefore includes monetary contributions, nonmonetary contributions, and loans in the selected scope. It is not cash on hand, net income, or a claim that every receipt is available to spend.
Periods and chart activity
A two-year cycle such as 2025–2026 includes transaction dates from January 1, 2025 through December 31, 2026, inclusive. A rolling-window view uses the exact displayed date boundaries. Filing coverage periods can extend beyond a UI transaction-date scope, so filing totals shown in scope need not equal the filing's full-period total. Homepage activity is grouped by calendar month and adds monthly receipts to monthly expenditures; it is activity volume, not a balance or a daily value.
Amendments and deduplication
For each filing identifier, public aggregate views select the highest available amendment identifier. Transaction rows are then deduplicated within the filing and filer using their transaction or line-item identifier. Earlier raw versions remain in upstream storage, but public aggregates normally represent the latest version available in the current extract. Missing or malformed identifiers can limit this rule.
Donor identity
When a donor is reported with a committee identifier, that identifier anchors the public donor grouping. Otherwise, the grouping key is deterministically derived from normalized reported name and address fields: last name, first name, city, state, and ZIP code. The public donor identifier is opaque and derived. It does not verify that two records represent the same real-world person or organization: source variations can split one donor, while identical reported fields can group different donors.
Linked-committee ballot-measure totals
Ballot-measure views use reviewed relationships that link a measure to committees identified as supporting or opposing it. Amounts are all receipts or expenditures reported by those linked committees within the selected scope. They are not transaction-level attribution showing that each dollar was earmarked for the measure. A committee missing from the relationship source is excluded from the measure total.
Manual refreshes and source verification
A PubSys operator initiates and reviews refreshes; the public interface does not promise an automated schedule or update deadline. The displayed raw-refresh timestamp identifies the latest successful raw-data refresh and does not prove that separately maintained entity context was captured at the same time. To verify a result, locate the filer, candidate, or measure identifier in the official source; compare the filing identifier, filing date, coverage period, and latest amendment; then compare the reported line item to the scope shown in PubSys.
Limitations
- Coverage varies by record type, source availability, filing period, and reviewed entity context.
- Candidate and ballot-measure rosters can lag or omit entities when public context is unavailable.
- State electronic filing data does not cover every local or federal campaign-finance record.
- Displayed records inherit filer-entered names, dates, amounts, classifications, and source errors.
- Candidate totals reflect linked committees and may exclude independent spending.
- No parity or accuracy percentage is asserted without a defined comparison population and measure.
- CSV export and a public developer API are not available in this product scope.
- Britto, Inc. operates this application; correction instructions are on the About page.