About this project

What this is

Who Funds Memphis makes Shelby County's campaign finance filings searchable. The filings are public records. They're also scanned PDFs on a government portal that can't be searched, compared, or read across, so almost nobody does. We put them in one place, checked them, and made them searchable.

We publish what candidates were required by law to report to the Shelby County Election Commission. We don't decide what's in the data, the disclosure law does. We don't change the figures a filer reported.

Who Funds Memphis is an independent, nonpartisan project with no affiliation to any candidate, party, or political organization, and we don't take a position on any race. Democratic and Republican money is shown the same way. The one thing we're for is that this information should be easy to see.

New to campaign finance? Start here explains what the numbers mean, why some donations look duplicated, and what the contribution limits are. This page is about where the data comes from and how far to trust it.

What this site covers

2026 Shelby County election, for Shelby County: the countywide offices, the seven municipal jurisdictions, the school boards, and the judicial and party-committee races on the same ballot.

Your state and federal races are the other door. Governor, state House, state Senate, and the U.S. Senate and House races on your August 6 ballot are at whofundstn.org — the same project, split by jurisdiction because the filings live with different agencies. Type your address on either site and the districts it reports will match.

No PAC pages here, and here's why. The Shelby County portal carries candidate filings only. PACs register and report to the state, so a PAC's own disclosure — who funds it, and everything else it spends on — lives at the state level, on whofundstn.org. A PAC that gives to a county candidate still shows up on that candidate's page, like any other donor.

Where the numbers come from

Every figure comes from a disclosure report a candidate filed with the Shelby County Election Commission. Candidates file every three to six months. A candidate who raises or spends more than $1,000 in a period itemizes every contributor who gave more than $100 — name, address, occupation, employer. Smaller gifts can be pooled into a single unnamed total, but only so much of it (a 2023 rule, explained under How donors get named), and many candidates itemize every dollar rather than track the cap.

Those filings are PDFs, many of them scans of paper forms, some handwritten. We use AI-assisted document recognition to pull structured records out of each one — names, addresses, amounts, dates — and every contribution links back to the exact page of the original PDF it came from. Click Source pages on any candidate page.

How we check the numbers

Every filing's parsed totals are compared against the summary the candidate signed on the front of the form — and from there the money and the text get different care.

The money we verify. Dollar amounts are checked against that signed summary; a misread number can't hide, because it wouldn't add up (what happens when it doesn't is just below).

The text we clean up. Names and employers have no signed summary to check a spelling against, so instead of verifying them we make them usable. A filing spells the same donor many ways — "ROBERT BERGHOZIAN" one page, "Bob Berghozian" the next — plus a city as "NASHVILLE" or an employer left "N/A." We normalize the formatting, drop the non-answers, and merge records we can prove are one person. We do so conservatively, with uncertain matches staying apart rather than merging on a guess, and a joint gift ("Dana & Lee Carter") staying its own donor, never folded into either partner. So a name may read more or less cleanly here than on the scan, and a misread name still doesn't mean a misread number.

A filing that doesn't reconcile is held back until a person works it. Its contributions don't appear on the site or in any total until then — the filing itself still shows in the candidate's history, with a link to the source PDF, so you can see it exists and read it yourself. Reviewing it sometimes clears the gap entirely; sometimes narrows it to within a $100 tolerance; and sometimes confirms a real discrepancy that stays flagged on the candidate's page. Whichever way it lands, a person cleared it before it published.

How often the numbers match the filing

For the 2026 Shelby County election, the cycle these headline numbers are built from, of 596 published filings:

Another 3 filings from this cycle have an unreviewed discrepancy and are currently held back under the rule above.

For incumbents, preliminary data from before the current election cycle is provided to show patterns while in office, along with links to the source filings. These earlier filings are marked Historical: they summarize the source rather than carry the full reconciliation we run on the current cycle. We are still in the process of reviewing filings that predate 2025.

Don't take our word for any of this. Every filing we hold back is listed, by name, in filings.csv — with its reconciliation status and whether its money is published. Filter to published = 0 and you have the held-back set; the counts above are what you'll get.

How donors get named

Tennessee names a contributor — address, occupation, employer — once that person gives more than $100 in a reporting period. At or below $100, the filer reports a single unnamed lump.

Since January 2023 that lump is capped at $2,000 per reporting period. Once a candidate's running total of small contributions crosses $2,000, every contribution after it is itemized regardless of size, by order of receipt. So a candidate with many small donors shows both a roughly $2,000 unnamed lump and a run of named sub-$100 contributions — that's the law, not a glitch in our data.

We name individuals at $200 or more per candidate, a higher bar than the law's $100, so small donors keep some privacy in a searchable database. Their gifts still count in the candidate's total; only the name is withheld. Organizations, businesses, and PACs are named at any amount.

The floor applies per candidate, totaled across every election cycle. A donor page shows their giving to each candidate whose lifetime total reached $200, and, for organizations, to every candidate. Someone who gave under $200 in one year but crossed it across several years to the same candidate is shown; small gifts to several different candidates are not, even if they sum past $200. A donor page and a candidate page always show the same set of contributions.

How we compute donor statistics

Each candidate page carries a "Who funds this campaign" panel: where the money came from, the average and median gift, a spread of gift sizes, and where donors are. These are aggregates: a share or an average across every donor names no one, so they count everyone who gave, including donors below the $200 display floor. The floor protects identities, not totals.

Two of those figures cover different sets, so they won't always tie out. Sources of funds covers everything the campaign raised, so its parts add up to the headline total. Gift sizes and geography cover itemized contributions only; loans and unitemized lump sums are left out.

• Sources of funds splits the total four ways: the candidate's own money (their contributions plus self- and family loans), individuals (including unitemized small gifts), organizations and PACs, and "other" (in-kind and loans that aren't the candidate's). The split is only person-versus-organization, nothing finer.
• Average and median gift count individuals only; one large PAC check would distort "the average person gave $X." A donor who filed under several spellings counts once.
• Gift-size buckets hold each individual donor's cycle total, so a donor named on the page can still land in a small bucket. They aren't "unnamed donors."
• Geography ranks cities by dollars. A city is named only with at least 5 donors from it, or at least 5% of the located dollars; everyone else folds into "elsewhere." The split appears only when at least 80% of dollars carry a usable state.

Every published statistic carries a "Why this number?" receipt with its formula and the filings behind it, and each is independently re-derived from the records before it publishes.

If a number looks wrong

Check it against the filing. Every contribution links to the page of the PDF it came from — click Source pages. If our number and the form disagree, the form wins and we want to hear about it.

The filer may be the one who's off. Campaigns make arithmetic errors, and a filing whose own summary contradicts its own itemized pages is common. We never silently paper over one: until a person reviews it, the filing's contributions are held back; after review it publishes with the discrepancy noted. Campaigns frequently amend their filings with the Election Commission at a later date.

Tell us. Email tips@whofundstn.org with the candidate's name, what looks wrong, and where you saw it. Corrections are the most useful mail we get.

Or go to the source. The Shelby County Election Commission holds the official records.

Known limitations

• Text cleaning is imperfect. We normalize formatting and merge donors we can prove are the same (above), but text fields have no signed-summary check the way dollar amounts do, so spelling variance and OCR errors slip through — affecting search and employer-based analysis. 86% of contributions from individuals name an employer or occupation (91% of those over $1,000).
• Two records for one person may not be merged yet. We match names across filings — "Robert Berghozian" and "Bob Berghozian" — with fuzzy matching and manual review; over 10,521 records have been merged. We leave two records apart rather than merge on a guess, because merging two different people is the worse error. Donor totals and leaderboard rankings carry that uncertainty.
• Exempt filers report no detail. A candidate who raises or spends less than $1,000 in a period files summary totals only.
• Donor totals stop at the county line. A donor's giving on Who Funds Tennessee isn't added to the totals here. Where the same donor links across both, a donor page shows an "Also gave" reference — a cross-reference, never a sum.
• The data is as current as the last filing. New filings are scraped, processed, and published in a daily 6 AM Central refresh; anything posted after appears the next day. Money raised this week isn't public yet.
• Party affiliations come from the certified candidate list, from the Shelby County Election Commission. Candidates who withdrew after certification are marked.

Using this data

The processed data is free to use with attribution. Credit Who Funds Memphis and link to whofundsmemphis.org. Bulk CSV downloads are on the bulk data page. The underlying campaign finance data is public record; the site design, editorial content, and data processing are original work. © 2026 Who Funds Memphis.

Your privacy as a reader

The address box never sends your address to us — it goes to the U.S. Census geocoder to find your districts, and nothing is stored.

This site uses Cloudflare Web Analytics, which sets no cookies, collects no personal information, and doesn't track visitors across sites.

The data portal has an optional box that turns a plain-English question into a database query. When you use it we log the question and the query (to improve the service over time), never a precise IP address, and only the public table structure and your question reach the AI model. The plain SQL box and the CSV downloads use no AI.

Who's behind this

Mavrick Fitzgerald

I'm an urban planner from Memphis. I built Who Funds Memphis because Shelby County's campaign-finance records are public but clunky to use, and following the money is one of the most basic ways to see who has a say in our politics. I run it independently, on my own time — no campaign, party, or donor funds it or has any say in what it shows.

Get in touch

Found a data error? Have a question about how we process filings? Want to use the data for a story or a research project? tips@whofundstn.org — for a data issue, include the candidate's name, what looks wrong, and where you saw it. Each candidate page links to the original filing if you want to compare first.