About | Who Funds Memphis

Our mission

Who Funds Memphis is an independent, nonpartisan civic data project. We have no affiliation with any candidate, party, or political organization. Our only goal is transparency.

Campaign finance filings in Shelby County are public records, but they're locked inside scanned PDFs on a government portal that makes them difficult to search, compare, or understand. We built this site to change that — turning those filings into a searchable database anyone can use.

Whether you're a voter researching candidates before an election, a journalist investigating political money, a researcher studying local politics, or a civic organization tracking accountability, this data belongs to you. We just made it easier to find.

The site currently covers the May 2026 Shelby County Primary. We plan to expand coverage to include past election cycles and to keep the site updated as future filings become available.

Who Funds Memphis is built and maintained by a Memphis-area developer. The underlying database is built entirely from public records filed with the Shelby County Election Commission.

What the numbers mean

Total raised: Sum of all contributions received, including in-kind contributions (goods or services donated instead of cash) and self-contributions (a candidate donating to their own campaign). If a candidate filed an amended report, only the amended version is counted.
Total spent: Sum of all expenditures reported, minus any refunds.
Cash on hand: The ending cash balance from the candidate's most recent filing, taken directly from the summary sheet. If a candidate shows "carried over," that's cash they had before this election cycle began — typically from a prior campaign for the same office.
Self-funded: Money a candidate put into their own campaign, either as direct contributions or personal loans. Shown separately on candidate pages when present.
Donors: Count of unique donors at or above the $200 threshold. One donor who gives to a candidate multiple times is counted once.

How we process the data

All data comes from campaign finance disclosure reports filed with the Shelby County Election Commission under Tennessee state law. Candidates for public office are required to file a finance report every 3-6 months, and candidates who raise or spend more than $1,000 in a filing period are required to provide an itemized list of all their contributions and expenditures.

The original filings are PDF documents — many of them scanned paper forms, some handwritten. We use AI-assisted document recognition to extract structured data (donor names, addresses, amounts, dates) from each filing.

Every filing is then validated by comparing our parsed totals against the summary figures printed on the original form. Discrepancies are reviewed and resolved manually. Candidate pages show a "Data in progress" notice when any filing hasn't been fully reviewed — treat those numbers as provisional.

Privacy & donor display threshold

Tennessee law requires itemized disclosure of donors giving $100 or more. We follow the federal disclosure standard of $200 per candidate for displaying individual donor names on this site. Contributions below that amount are counted in a candidate's total but donors are not individually named.

How the threshold works on donor pages

The Donors page shows donors who crossed the $200 threshold for at least one candidate. Once a donor qualifies, all of their contributions to every candidate are shown on their donor profile page — including contributions below $200 to other candidates.

Because the threshold is applied per candidate, a donor who gave smaller amounts to several candidates will not appear on the site even if their total across all candidates exceeds $200. This is by design — it matches how campaign finance disclosures work at the candidate level.

Known limitations

Donor deduplication is ongoing. We use fuzzy name matching and manual review to merge records for the same person across different candidates' filings (e.g., "Robert Smith" vs. "Bob Smith"). Over 4,476 donor records have been merged so far, but duplicates likely remain — particularly for common names or donors whose information varies across filings.
Data is updated daily at 8 AM Central. New filings are automatically scraped, processed, and published each morning. All filings posted to the Election Commission portal the previous day will appear in that morning's update.
Some dollar amounts may have discrepancies. We validate every filing's parsed totals against the summary figures on the original form. Most filings match exactly or within a few dollars, but handwritten forms, poor-quality scans, and missing or incomplete entries can produce larger errors — occasionally in the hundreds or thousands of dollars. Filings with unresolved discrepancies are flagged on candidate pages. We review these manually and continue to improve accuracy over time.
Names, addresses, and employers may have OCR errors. Dollar amounts can be validated against filing totals, but text fields like donor names, employers, and addresses have no built-in check. Misspellings, abbreviations, and inconsistent formatting are common — especially on handwritten filings. This can affect search results and employer-based analysis. We are actively cleaning these records but some errors will remain.
Exempt filers. Candidates who raise or spend less than $1,000 in a filing period are exempt from itemized disclosure. Their filings show summary totals only, with no individual contribution or expenditure detail.
Party affiliations. Party designations are sourced from the Shelby County Election Commission's certified candidate list. Candidates who withdrew after certification are marked accordingly.

Data accuracy & legal

We work hard to get the numbers right, but this site is not an official government resource. Our data is processed from scanned filings, and the nature of handwritten and non-standard documents means some errors are unavoidable. If something looks off, check it against the original filing — or contact the Shelby County Election Commission for official records.

The processed data on this site is free to use with attribution. If you use our data in reporting, research, or other projects, please credit Who Funds Memphis and link back to whofundsmemphis.org.

This site uses Cloudflare Web Analytics, a privacy-focused analytics tool that does not use cookies, does not collect personal information, and does not track individual visitors across sites.

Get in touch

Found a data error? Have a question about how we process filings? Want to use our data for a story or research project? We'd like to hear from you: tips@whofundsmemphis.org

If you're reporting a data issue, please include as much detail as you can — the candidate name, what looks wrong, and where you noticed it. Links to original source filings are on each candidate's page if you want to compare against the original PDF.

About this project