What this covers
Public records filed under the Montana Commissioner of Political Practices (COPP), grouped by domain and searchable from one place.
- ·Campaign Finance — candidates, committees, contributions and expenditures filed under Montana campaign-finance rules.
- ·Lobbyist & Principal — registered lobbyists and the principals who retain them, with reported expenditures per biennial session.
- ·Statement of Financial Interest — financial-interest disclosures by public officials, legislators, and state employees (index in progress).
- ·People & Entities — unified profiles for people and organizations appearing across multiple domains.
Data sources
- ·Montana COPP Lobbyist Registry — lobbyist-ext.mt.gov. Lobbyists, principals, registrations, expenditure reports, and issue positions for biennial sessions 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024, and 2026.
- ·Montana COPP Campaign Finance — politicalpractices.mt.gov/Campaign-Finance. Contributions, expenditures, candidate and committee registrations back to 1998.
Key thresholds & rules
- ·$3,000 lobbying threshold (MCA 5-7-112). Principals whose total lobbying expenditures exceed $3,000 in a reporting period must register and file. The threshold is adjusted every two years.
- ·Electronic filing required since October 2023. All lobbying reports must be filed electronically through the COPP portal.
- ·Biennial sessions. Lobbying data is organized by session year (labeled by the even-numbered end year). The 2023-2024 session is labeled “2024” throughout this index.
Coverage notes
- ·Lobbyist data coverage: 2017-2026 complete for all registered lobbyists and principals, including every filed report and payment line item (59,260 payment lines indexed).
- ·Campaign finance coverage: Top donor and recipient summaries from 1998-2026; full contribution-level browse is currently limited to the top 20 donors per city for the 50 largest Montana cities.
- ·Statement of Financial Interest: index pending. Filings remain available directly from politicalpractices.mt.gov.
- ·Known data quirks: Two 2020 lobbyist filings contain test values ($123M, $50M) and are excluded from totals. Some 2018 relationship authorize-dates contain sentinel values and display as "N/A".
AI research assistant
The Ask feature is powered by Anthropic’s Claude (model claude-sonnet-4-6). Claude is restricted to a narrow set of tools that query the indexed Montana COPP records only; every named person, committee, lobbyist, or principal must carry a bracketed citation linking back to the source record. Answers are not drawn from Claude’s general knowledge of Montana politics — the assistant will say so plainly if the tools return no results.
