Created by DB in partnership with JOTA, a journalism and technology company, the Follow the Money platform helped the population and press monitor campaign revenues and expenditures during the 2022 elections. The project became an important tool for public transparency and combating corruption in the electoral process.

• Provided updated data for election news coverage and public monitoring;
• Produced qualified analyses on election accountability;
• Supplied election revenue and expenditure data used in more than 20 reports published across 5 different media outlets.

Built with cutting-edge technology to automatically extract and organize information from the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), the dashboard offers updated data on election financing. The platform allows users to select various filters, such as geographic, racial, gender, and more.

The Follow the Money project was essential for mapping inequalities and inconsistencies in election financing during 2022. The tool was used in over 20 reports on topics such as racial and gender disparities in campaign financing, the effect of technology on electoral financing, gaps in financial accountability, candidates who received the most campaign funding, and more. According to Kalleo Coura, JOTA’s executive editor in São Paulo, “the campaign financial data was organized simply and intuitively in the platform’s dashboards, enabling the identification of inconsistencies and interesting trends.”

The dashboard facilitated the creation of reports that revealed deep inequalities in campaign resource distribution. Using filters to explore the proportion of revenues and expenditures across different candidate profiles, the dashboard enabled analyses highlighting the lack of resources for Indigenous candidates—30% of Indigenous candidates received no campaign funding—and disparities between resources allocated to white and Black candidates, with the former group receiving twice as much funding on average.

“

During the electoral race, it was essential to access the Follow the Money visualization, which used open data from the Electoral Justice system that wouldn’t otherwise have been easily combined or cross-referenced to produce content of public interest. In the coverage, this information supported reports on candidates receiving the most public funds for their campaigns, but, most importantly, it highlighted regional, partisan, gender, and racial inequalities. With data presented by the platform, we showed that white candidates for the Chamber of Deputies received, on average, twice the resources as Black candidates, and one-fifth of women didn’t receive even R$1 from their parties, for instance.

Letícia Paiva, JOTA Reporter

In addition to identifying trends in campaign financing for federal offices, the ability to create regional filters facilitated the monitoring of expenditures in states such as Roraima. The tool also helped identify irregularities and errors in candidates’ and parties’ financial disclosures. This was the case with the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB), which reported revenue of over R$400 million from the Electoral Campaign Fund attributed to union leader Zé Francisco, placing him at the top among candidates receiving public funding during the 2022 elections.

The dashboard was developed through a combination of automated extraction techniques and a rigorous process of data treatment and standardization. This enabled real-time access to information from the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), presented in an intuitive format where users can search and create custom filters by state, party, office, gender, race, and more.

DB also makes updated election revenue and expenditure data available on its platform, allowing users to download treated tables or access them through data analysis tools like SQL, Python, and R.

Access updated data on Brazilian elections.