fecgov / fecfile Goto Github PK

I noticed this duplicate issue some time ago but only recently conducted an experiment to find out how large it might be.

I recently downloaded the 7241 daily .zips (through 2021-03-28) containing the many .fec files. I expanded all the .zips and renamed all the filename.fec files to have a prefix of the zip name followed by the fec filename. For example, the file 1506481.fec in the 20210328.zip was renamed 20210328-1506481.fec. This was to make sure all the .fec files had unique names in case they were repeated in several zips. (This assumed the zips did not allow duplicates.)

I then computed md5sums for all the 1,180,552 .fec files and looked for duplicate md5sums.

The attached file shows the duplicate results.
FEC-electronic-files-duplicate.xlsx

I found 1631 files that were duplicated twice. In two of the cases the duplicates were quite large: 9.7 GB and 2.8 GB.

Twenty-five files were repeated three times. In once case each, one file was repeated six times, and another twelve times.

Can you at least block duplicate submissions to avoid this duplicate problem with new files?