We’ve seen some progress with the number of organized Democratic committees being organized since my last map was created in February. 24 new towns appear on the map.
Here’s the list of towns added to the map:
- Adams 3/27/2017
- Avon 4/5/2017
- Brookfield 3/24/2017 error
- Chester 4/6/2017
- East Longmeadow 3/31/2017
- Georgetown 2/21/2017
- Lenox 3/31/2017
- Lunenburg 3/22/2017
- Monson 3/29/2017
- New Marlborough 4/4/2017
- Paxon 4/3/2017
- Pelham 3/2/2017
- Plainville 3/22/2017
- Princeton 4/3/2017
- Rowe 3/16/2016 error
- Rowley 3/29/2017
- Seeknonk 3/2/2017
- Stoughton 11/4/2016 error
- Sudbury 6/27/2016 error
- Upton 3/3/2017
- Wareham 3/10/2017
- Wayland 12/14/2016 error
- Webster 4/5/2017
- Wendell 2/27/2017
- West Springfield 3/31/2017
- Westwood 2/21/2017
- Worthington 3/21/2017
Problems With Data
You’ll notice five of the organized democratic committees have notations next to them with the word “error”. I pulled the statement of organized Democratic local political committees from the Office of Campaign and Political Finance’s website. There’s a report we can download that lists every town’s date of organization since last Spring’s Presidential Primary.
A colleague noticed on my original map that Stoughton wasn’t organized, yet it had been, and the paperwork had been sent into the OCPF.
Interestingly, the data is in the individual OCPF reports by filtering. However, for some reason for Stoughton this data wasn’t pulling the date of the Statement of organization in the overall report of towns in Massachusetts.
Based on this finding, I went back and checked all of the towns in Massachusetts and found four more “errors”.
Stoughton’s chair had contacted the OCPF and had already updated their file, so the data was downloading correctly, but the other four towns were still not correctly pulling data. This week I let the Auditor at the OCPF know about the error, and hopefully the towns will be updated. It would also be good to find out why the problem occurred.
Percentage of Organized Towns
My other map of financial activity does provide some insights. I believe 41% of DTC’s file financial data with the State. But only 31% of town committees spend more than $100 on the part of the committee.
