How to read the campaign-finance record

• Federal Election Commission only. Identity, committees, authoritative candidate-committee linkage, and reconciled totals come from FEC bulk data; itemized contributions and independent expenditures come from the FEC API. No third-party or aggregator data is treated as canonical.
• Local corpus vs live FEC. A bounded recent sample is ingested locally for fast research and resilience; the complete authoritative record is searched live from the FEC on demand. Every result says whether it is the bounded local sample, a live FEC result, or a cached live result. A live result is never silently replaced by the local sample and presented as complete.

• Deterministic member↔candidate linkage only. A TQL member is linked to an FEC candidate by office + state + district (House) / state (Senate) + exact normalized name, and only when that is unique. Members with no deterministic match show campaign-finance identity unavailable — identity is never guessed from names.
• Contributor names are as reported. No canonical-person graph is built; “JOHN SMITH” and “JOHN Q SMITH” are not asserted to be the same person.
• Congress ≠ election cycle. Congressional service (e.g. the 118th Congress) and a two-year election cycle (e.g. 2022) are related but distinct, and are always labeled distinctly.

• Headline totals come only from the FEC's reconciled candidate summary — never summed from itemized transaction rows.
• Aggregations are transparent. Employer/occupation/state aggregations group by the reported value over the stated row set, count rows, and sum a represented itemized amount that excludes memo entries (memo rows are not independent new money). Spelling variants are preserved — no entity consolidation. Each aggregation discloses its source class and is not a total or a measure of influence.
• Memo / amendments / sub_id. Itemized rows are de-duplicated on the FEC sub_id; memo rows are flagged; refunds/negative adjustments retain their reported sign.
• Reported employer/occupation are contributor-supplied, not verified corporate affiliation; values such as SELF, RETIRED, NOT EMPLOYED, INFORMATION REQUESTED, and blanks are kept as reported.

An independent expenditure is spending by a committee independent of a candidate. Support/oppose is the spender's reported classification. It is not a contribution to the candidate and implies no coordination, control, causation, or corruption.

The Quiet Ledger does not rate candidates, members, or donors for corruption, influence, capture, or integrity, and assigns no candidate, member, donor, or party ranking. It never claims a contribution caused a vote, and never presents temporal proximity between money and legislation as causation or improper influence. Exports are bounded and labeled; a bounded export is never the entire FEC corpus.