Each record contains up to 19 pieces of information, including each donor's name, street address, city, ZIP code, occupation and employer. The computer database indicates whether contributions came from individuals or from political action committees.
Election laws are far more lax in some surrounding states, such as Kentucky, Ohio and Virginia.
Those laws have allowed individual contributors to donate tens of thousands of dollars to individual candidates in state elections. Before the PERC project, campaign finance data has never been available in computer-readable form. Secretary of State Ken Hechler keeps all records of election contributions and expenditures for statewide offices and for legislative races, but the information is on paper in file cabinets, not on computer disks. Preliminary analyses of the data reveal political action committees were far less important in the governor's race than in legislative races. Coal, hospital, insurance, lawyer and labor union groups all set up PACs.