pac.dog pac.dog

101

A mechanical tour of U.S. federal campaign finance + Congress. Seven modules, read in order; every term appears defined before it's reused.

Take today's 4-question quiz → — free, no sign-in required, skippable from any module.

  1. Elections + candidates
    The four kinds of elections, the federal offices, and what makes someone a candidate under FEC rules.
  2. Committees
    How money flows through registered committees — candidate committees, PACs, super PACs, JFCs, party committees, and the 501(c) adjacents.
  3. Contributions + limits
    Federal dollar caps, state-by-state divergence, deposit + refund + best-efforts rules, solicitation language, personal use, and the enforcement ladder.
  4. Bills + sponsors
    What a federal bill is, how it is identified, and the difference between a sponsor and a cosponsor.
  5. Actions, votes, congresses
    The lifecycle of a bill as a sequence of actions, what a roll-call vote records, and what a Congress actually is.
  6. Filings
    Periodic FEC financial reports — Form 3, Form 3X, Form 6, and the schedules that itemize receipts + disbursements.
  7. Lobbying
    LDA registration, the quarterly LD-2, the semiannual LD-203, FARA for foreign agents, and how to read a filing.
  8. History + how pac.dog mirrors it
    A short legal history (FECA → BCRA → Citizens United → SpeechNow) and how every concept above maps to a pac.dog page.
  9. Using pac.dog
    A tour of every surface — search, ask, watchlists, connections, trends, threads, tools — and what each one is for.

pac.dog is a free, independent, non-partisan research tool. Every candidate, committee, bill, vote, member, and nonprofit on this site is mirrored from primary U.S. government sources (FEC, congress.gov, govinfo.gov, IRS) and each state's Secretary of State / election commission — no third-party data vendors, no paywall, no editorial intermediation. Citations to the originating source are on every detail page.

Estimated value: $180/mo per user — but we made it free.