Two fields of study, aimed at the same problem.
Political science is what makes a lobbying filing or a campaign finance report mean something instead of just being a form. It tells you what to look for and why it matters.
Data science is what makes the matching actually possible. The same organization can be spelled six different ways across six agencies, and finding that out by eye doesn’t scale past a page or two.
Iowa is a useful place to start.
It’s one of eight states that requires a lobbyist to disclose which side of a bill they’re on, so the paper trail here is unusually complete if you know where to look. That’s where Delotrope started, and it’s still the deepest case on the site.
One person, on purpose.
Delotrope is a startup. I’m not dressing that up as something bigger than it is, and I’m not treating it like a side project either. I built the matching pipeline and took on a live case before the website existed, because the point was to start doing the actual work, not spend a year getting ready to do it.
What a one-person startup gets you day to day is direct: the person who reads the filing is the same person who builds the map and the same person who checks every line against the source before it goes out. There’s no account manager between you and the work, and no queue to sit in behind bigger clients.
If something doesn’t check out, you hear that from me, not through someone managing the relationship.
That standard doesn’t bend for who’s asking. I’ll take a fight from either side of a room, and the same organization gets checked the same way whether it’s the client or the client’s opponent.
A startup doesn’t get a shortcut on the standard. Every claim still has to trace back to a filing you could pull yourself, the same as it would from a firm ten times the size.
Send me your fight, and I’ll tell you straight what I can do with it.