Voting Influence Corruption · Version 1.1 · 2024 Cycle
Control & Ownership of the US Federal Government
Federal money and federal votes, 2024 cycle. An attempt to measure the distance between
the people who authorise a government and the people who finance it. (State and local
layers are not yet built.)
Read this to get an overview of the report. The data was assembled for a separate
project, to test how these numbers hold up against a thesis - and the test is reported
below whichever way it came out.
Refuted
The prediction this report was built to test failed.
Funding share explains only 4–7% of how members of Congress actually vote; party affiliation
explains nearly all the rest. It is published as refuted rather than quietly reframed.
71.8%
The median senator draws roughly seven of every ten itemised dollars
from people who cannot vote for them. This is where the divergence is real —
in who supplies the money, not in who defects on votes.
What one adult costs
Every dollar in the 2024 federal cycle — contributions and independent
expenditure together — divided by the voting-age population of the state it was
spent in. The dark portion of each bar is money spent for or given to
candidates; the red portion is money spent to defeat one.
Figure 1 · Federal money per voting-age adult, top 15 states, 2024 cycle
for and to candidatesspent against
$6.49 billion across 265.9 million voting-age adults — $24.41 each nationally, against a
median state of $19.02. Montana, with roughly 850,000 adults and a Senate
race that drew national money, sits an order of magnitude above the median: the
price of an adult is set by how contested the seat is, not by how many adults
there are. Source: FEC 2024 cycle receipts and independent expenditure, joined to
Census voting-age population.
Who supplies it
The same money, re-sorted by where it came from rather than what it was spent on.
One square is $5 million raised by a sitting member of Congress in the 2024
cycle. Teal is money from outside the state or district that member represents.
Figure 2 · One square = $5M raised · inside vs outside the electorate
from outside the electoratefrom inside
Senate: $755.5M from outside against $363.3M from inside, across 96 members — the median senator draws
71.8% of itemised dollars from people who cannot vote for them. House:
$656.5M outside against $636.0M inside, across 422 members, median 40.1%. The two blocks are drawn at one scale, so the
difference in shape is the finding: a House seat is financed roughly half from home,
a Senate seat is not. Source: FEC itemised individual contributions, 2024 cycle,
aggregated per sitting member.
What the money actually looks like
In the 2024 federal cycle, the dominant channel of political money was not contribution
to candidates. It was expenditure about them, by committees the candidate does not
control and is not accountable for.
$2.56B
spent against candidates as independent expenditures
FEC 24A · 19,188 txns
$1.95B
spent for candidates, but not given to them
FEC 24E · 57,809 txns
$545M
actually contributed to candidate committees
FEC 24K · 330,737 txns
8.3×
independent expenditure exceeds direct contribution
Derived
Independent expenditure against a candidate$2,555,156,720
Independent expenditure for a candidate$1,945,739,929
Direct contribution to candidate committee$545,392,705
Coordinated party expenditure$90,600,178
Put plainly: for every dollar given to a federal candidate in this dataset,
$8.25 was spent about them by someone else. The single largest category is
money spent to defeat a candidate rather than to elect one. This is the structural legacy of
Citizens United v. FEC (2010) and SpeechNow.org v. FEC (2010), which together
permitted unlimited independent expenditure by committees that accept unlimited contributions.
Drawn to scale from the four FEC transaction categories above. The two channels
the candidate cannot control total 8.25× the money actually given to them,
and the largest single channel exists to defeat someone.
Concentration
2,575
Super PACs and single-candidate IE committees registered
FEC cmte type O/U
1,119
committees that actually made an independent expenditure
FEC 24A/24E
49.5%
of all IE dollars came from the largest 1% of transactions
Derived
$17.8B
moved committee-to-committee across 18.7M transactions
FEC oth24
Largest independent-expenditure committees, 2024
Committee
FEC type
Spent
Txns
FF PAC
V
$509.6M
490
Make America Great Again Inc.
O
$377.0M
465
WinSenate
O
$311.3M
578
Congressional Leadership Fund
W
$216.8M
2,096
Senate Leadership Fund
O
$211.1M
317
HMP (House Majority PAC)
W
$199.8M
1,420
America PAC
O
$173.7M
1,186
Americans for Prosperity Action
V
$162.0M
3,081
Preserve America PAC
O
$112.3M
30
SFA Fund, Inc.
V
$81.8M
360
Ten committees account for roughly $2.36 billion of independent expenditure — more than
four times the total contributed directly to every federal candidate combined. Note the
transaction counts: Preserve America PAC moved $112.3 million in 30 transactions,
an average of $3.7 million each.
Three findings. The second one breaks this report's own premise.
8.25:1
Money given to candidates is the small channel. For every
dollar contributed directly, $8.25 was spent about them by
committees no candidate may legally coordinate with. The largest single category is not
money spent to elect anyone — it is money spent to defeat someone.
Refuted
The prediction this report was built to test failed.
Funding share explains just 4–7% of how members of Congress actually
vote. Party affiliation explains nearly all the rest. It stands here as refuted — not
quietly reframed, not buried in an appendix.
71.8%
The median senator draws roughly seven of every ten
itemised dollars from people who cannot vote for them. This is where the
divergence is real: in who supplies the money, not in who defects on the floor.
The finding that cuts against us
The most important result on this page contradicts the thesis the report set out to
explore. Across the 2024 cycle, money correlates only weakly with roll-call behaviour
(r = 0.20 Republican, 0.27 Democrat — roughly 4–7% of variance
explained). Party affiliation accounts for almost everything roll-call voting has to
explain. It is stated here, in full, ahead of the test itself, because a report engineered
to confirm its own premise would be worthless as evidence. The full record of what was
predicted and what survived sits in the
Falsifiability Register.
The test that could have refuted this report
A naive reading of the IOCE paradigm predicts that concentrated money buys concentrated
control — that heavily-funded legislators should vote differently. We pre-registered that
prediction and tested it against 1,497,926 individual roll-call votes across the 117th–119th
Congresses.
Party
Members
Mean party unity
r (PAC share × unity)
r²
Republican
262
92.3%
0.195
0.038
Democrat
253
96.9%
0.267
0.071
The prediction failed. PAC funding share explains between 4% and 7% of the
variation in how often a member votes with their party. Party affiliation alone explains the
overwhelming majority. If this report existed to confirm that money buys votes on the floor of
Congress, it would have to report that it did not find it.
What this does and does not license
It does not follow that money has no effect. It follows that money does not
operate through defection on recorded votes — which is the one channel this dataset can
see. Roll calls occur after agenda-setting, candidate selection, committee assignment and bill
drafting have already filtered what can be voted on. A measurement that finds nothing at the
last stage of a pipeline says little about the earlier stages. We treat this as
unresolved, not as exoneration, and we say so in the
Uncertainty Taxonomy.
The register at a glance
Five hypotheses, each with its refutation condition fixed before the data was
queried. Two failed their own test and are published as failed. Every verdict links to the
working:
The three that survived are all structural — they describe where the money
comes from and who controls it. Both that failed were behavioural — they
predicted that the money changes what legislators do. That is the shape of the result, and it is
not the shape the report set out to find.
Where divergence actually shows up
The ownership/control gap in this data is not primarily behavioural. It is
structural — visible in who supplies the resources rather than in who defects on votes:
Authorisation is equal; finance is not. Every eligible voter holds an
identical share of the mandate. The financing distribution is concentrated enough that the
largest 1% of expenditures carry half the dollars.
Most money is unaccountable by construction. 89% of the money measured
here flows through committees a candidate may not legally coordinate with.
The dominant use of money is negative. More was spent to defeat
candidates than to support them.
This is what OCDI-Gov is designed to quantify: the
distance between the distribution that authorises an office and the distribution that
finances it.
Financed by people who cannot vote for you
Aggregating all 58,208,756 individual contribution records to committee × state, and matching
519 sitting members to their committees, gives the clearest divergence signal in the report:
71.8%
median share of the typical senator's itemised individual funding from outside their state
FEC indiv24 · n=96
40.1%
same figure for the median House member
FEC indiv24 · n=423
45.3%
median across all 519 matched members
Derived
$15.65B
total individual contributions aggregated
FEC indiv24
Senate — median out-of-state funding share71.8%
House — median out-of-state funding share40.1%
Pre-registered refutation threshold for H425.0%
This one survives the honesty test that H2 failed. It was pre-registered with a refutation
condition — median below 25% — and the observed value clears it in both chambers. The median
senator draws roughly seven of every ten itemised dollars from people who hold no
share of the mandate they are financing.
One caveat, stated plainly: this is a share of itemised contributions.
Sub-$200 donations are not universally itemised, so this population skews toward larger donors.
The ratio is unaffected — both numerator and denominator come from the same itemised pool — but
it should not be read as a claim about all donors. Full detail in the
Falsifiability Register.
Scope and honesty about coverage
Version 1.1 covers federal money and federal roll calls,
and the title now says so. An earlier draft was titled "Federal, State, Local and Individual",
which described the intended programme rather than what had been built; it was corrected
on 10 August 2026. Specifically not yet included: state campaign-finance
filings, lobbying disclosures (Senate/House LDA), 501(c)(4) issue spending, media-ownership
concentration, and ballot-measure funding. Each is a planned layer with an identified public
bulk source; see the roadmap.
Privacy decision
FEC individual-contribution records are public and include donor names, street addresses,
employers and occupations. This report deliberately stores and publishes aggregates
only — by committee, state, ZIP and amount band. Re-publishing a searchable donor
dossier would add nothing analytically and would expose private individuals to targeting.
The database schema has nowhere to put a donor's name.