Data crunching David Lynn takes his campaign finance reporting solo.

There's a new campaign finance watchdog in town.

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Data crunching David Lynn takes his campaign finance reporting solo.

POSTED: Wednesday, March 21, 2012, 5:05 PM
Filed Under: Hall Monitor | News

There's a new campaign finance watchdog in town and politicos, good government folks, data junkies and journalists might want to bookmark this one.

David Lynn, database programmer and former author of a column on campaign finance for the Public Record, has launched his own website, freepoliticalspeech.com, and intends to turn it into a new source of unreported — and, we're betting, often intriguing — details of how and where money is spent in local politics — "to use publicly available data and explain its meaning to the public in plain language."

Lynn knows the data well: he created free software to help candidates maintain and properly file their campaign finance reports to the state; and his column in the Public Record demonstrated both an unusual appetite for the kind of details virtually no one in this city has time or mandate to uncover,  and also an ability to turn those details into news: Lynn's reporting on financial irregularities within Stephanie Singer's campaign for City Commissioner preceded the city's Board of Ethics announcing settlement agreements with her campaign for violations of city finance rules.

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