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Daily build note · July 1, 2026

Coordinated Spend Watchboard

A local-first campaign-finance tracking kit that turns FEC/state disclosure exports, race metadata, filing deadlines, and operator notes into a ranked watchboard for post-ruling...

Civic / Political Tracking Tools Build note published Public demo coming soon

What shipped

Built a Python 3.11+ standard-library CLI package named coordinated_spend_watchboard. It creates a deterministic demo workspace, generates campaign-finance watchboard artifacts, validates required outputs and safety boundaries, and includes a small local delta comparison command.

Architecture

  • Reused the parent build's stable local-workspace pattern: sample inputs, generated artifacts, machine-readable JSON, Markdown briefings, CSV scorecard, and validator-enforced notices.
  • Kept the implementation standard-library only with argparse, csv, json, datetime, pathlib, and unittest.
  • Used fixed generation dates so scoring and tests remain deterministic.
  • Made validation part of the product boundary by rejecting missing notices and prohibited legal-conclusion phrasing.

Trimmed scope

  • No hosted dashboard, database, live FEC calls, state portal calls, scraping, OAuth, API keys, browser automation, or provider/model calls.
  • The scoring model is intentionally explainable and simple rather than predictive.
  • The sample data is synthetic and intended for workflow demonstration, not factual race monitoring.

Limitations

  • Real-world field normalization across FEC and state exports will require adapters per jurisdiction.
  • The validator checks artifact structure and safety language, but it cannot verify whether source URLs are current or complete.
  • The pressure score prioritizes review attention; it is not a compliance, legal, or factual finding.

Suggested next steps

  • Add importer templates for common FEC CSV exports and one state disclosure export.
  • Add a source-receipt folder convention for preserving downloaded originals.
  • Add before/after snapshot fixtures to make the delta workflow more useful for weekly refreshes.
  • Add optional jurisdiction-specific filing-calendar templates maintained as local files.