What TerraCivic is

Its purpose

The record is public. It should also be usable.

Political money is public by law, but it is not usable by ordinary people. The records exist so citizens can see who funds power. In practice they sit in the Federal Election Commission’s compliance database and in fifty separate state systems, each with its own format, its own rules and its own dead ends. They were built for filing, not for understanding.

TerraCivic’s purpose is to close that gap: to take the record as the law intends it, translate it into plain language, tie it to the places people actually live, and give it back to the public.

What it does

The record

• Candidates: a page for every federal candidate, with money raised, spent and on hand; where it comes from (by size of gift and by state, with PACs named); the race; cited polls; and, for sitting members of Congress, their votes and bills.
• Races: every U.S. House and Senate race and the governor’s races, with the candidates side by side.
• State legislators: every sitting member of all fifty state legislatures, the counties their districts reach, and their campaign money where the state’s records allow.
• Your candidates: type a ZIP code or address and see the races on your ballot. Nothing is stored.
• All the money: federal campaign money counted once (money passed between committees is not double-counted), outside spending, 527 groups, and state campaign money from a growing number of state disclosure systems.
• Companies: a page for each company PAC, showing whom it funds.
• Search across all of it, and an honest map of what is covered, and what is missing, in each state.

The Money Map

• The political giving connected to businesses around you: near you, along a route, or in an area you draw, across more than two hundred thousand mapped locations.
• Two separate measures: what the company’s own PAC gives, and what its employees give as a group. They are shown side by side and never blended, because a company and its workers are not the same thing.
• Every result links to the FEC records behind it, and can be saved as a PDF.

Open the Money Map →

Why it exists

The hole it fills

1. The data is public but unreadable. FEC.gov is built for lawyers and filers. State systems are scattered and inconsistent, and several states legally limit how their filings can be reused. Most people never get past the first search form.
2. Spending choices are political, and people make them blind. Many people want their dollars to match their values, but what reaches them is rumor, viral boycott lists and partisan scorecards. There is almost nowhere to see the actual, sourced record of where a business’s political money goes, on both sides, with the method shown.
3. Down-ballot races are invisible. Most voters cannot name their state legislators, let alone who funds them, yet state legislatures decide much of daily life. TerraCivic covers all fifty.
4. Trust is broken. Most political information arrives with a point of view attached. TerraCivic’s value is that it does not: no ratings, no scores, no endorsements, no “good” or “bad” companies. It shows facts, with their source and their date.

What keeps it trustworthy

The rules TerraCivic follows

• Public records only, with the source and retrieval date on every figure.
• No individual donor is ever named. TerraCivic follows the federal rule against using contributor information for solicitation or commercial purposes, and respects every state law that bars reuse of its filings. See Data use & privacy.
• Neutral by design: both parties, the same method for all, and the visitor decides.
• Honest about its limits: what a company PAC gives is not the whole company, employee giving is not the company’s position, and the site says plainly where data is missing.

Who it is for

For the politically minded

TerraCivic is for people who want to make honest, conscientious political choices, at the ballot box and with their money, and want to make them from facts instead of noise. It does not tell you who to vote for or where to shop. It shows you, clearly and fairly, who is funding whom, and trusts you with the rest.