by Chali Pittman / Isthmus, Wisconsin Watch
August 3, 2026
The Wisconsin Ethics Commission’s new dashboard tries to make campaign finance information more accessible to the public. It cost $285,000 to build and will cost more than $270,000 to maintain over two years, plus another $20,000 to eliminate erroneous and duplicative records, according to Daniel Carlton, administrator of the Wisconsin Ethics Commission.
“The biggest gain for the public is that the new website has much easier and more complete access to reported activity,” says Carlton. “It’s presented in a much more transparent, easy-to-navigate way than ever before.” The website’s tagline? “Welcome to Sunshine.”
As a reporter, I remember scraping through campaign finance reports under the old system, trying to find information about state legislative campaigns. The website was slow and frequently froze up. Campaign finance information was uploaded via PDF. Sorting through the data was not fun.
The new dashboard was launched a year ago, in August 2025, and the coming Aug. 11 primary and the Nov. 3 election will present key opportunities to test it out. You can use the portal — at campaignfinance.wi.gov — to search for information on state candidates, including governor, attorney general and state legislator.
The site tracks individual candidate’s donors and recipients. You can also see how candidates spend (or “disburse”) the money they raise on such things as media, campaign staff and polling. You can find donors and easily see what other candidates they’ve given to. There are many other ways to filter information. To confirm your information, you can download the actual reports submitted by the campaigns.
As is often the case, the data isn’t always perfect. This spring, while reporting on a circuit court race, I used data from the Ethics Commission, confirming it in the actual campaign finance report. That data, according to the campaign manager, was wrong; it showed the campaign of a state Supreme Court justice donating more than the $6,000 maximally allowable for a circuit court election.
The campaign manager promised to correct this error in April, blaming the new reporting website. When asked again ahead of the most recent filing deadline, in July, he again promised to correct it. It has still not been corrected.
Blowback over erroneous campaign finance reports recently forced Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez out of the race for governor.
Carlton says typos and imperfect recordkeeping can create multiple entities when there should be one. ActBlue — a PAC that helps Democrats fundraise — is a good example. A filer can accidentally type “Act Blue” or “ActBlur,” which would be logged as separate entities.
The Ethics Commission has built a tool to “de-duplicate” entries like these. So far, it has reduced duplicative entities by 78% — from 12 million down to roughly 2.6 million. Carlton says the extra cost to streamline the data was “well worth it.”
“Staff is watching for obvious duplications and trying to deduplicate them after reporting deadlines,” says Carlton. “Of course, anyone that identifies duplicates can let us know and we can fix them quickly.” But a challenge of the system, he adds, is that “many users input data without training or experience, which can lead to data integrity issues. The system has to be set up to try to keep entities separate, but there is no perfect way to do that.”
Like with any new technology, the site comes with some growing pains. But the state should be lauded for trying to make campaign finance information — famously a shadowy process with plenty of loopholes — more accessible to the public.
Chali Pittman is a staff writer at Isthmus newspaper and a member of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (wisfoic.org), a nonprofit, nonpartisan group dedicated to open government. Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the council.
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