Public records only
Sources include the Nevada Secretary of State, NV Legislature lobbyist registry, campaign-finance disclosures, federal lobbying filings, court filings, and FOIA-released documents. Each page links its sources.
A Public-Records Project
Who actually runs Nevada?
Carson City has a permanent class of corporate clients, paid lobbyists, revolving-door appointees, and donor cartels who keep their grip on policy regardless of which party wins. This site documents that establishment from public records — bipartisan in scope, sourced and citable.
What we're tracking
Each vertical answers one piece of the same question: where does Nevada policy actually come from?
Vertical 01
Donor cartels
Who pays for Carson City — by industry, by cycle, by recipient. Data drawn from Nevada's campaign-finance disclosures (cf_* dataset).
Built — real data Vertical 02Lobbyists
Every paid and unpaid lobbyist registered for the 83rd Session, with the corporate and trade-group clients each one represents — and what each client has spent on Nevada politics.
Built — 1,151 lobbyists · 1,371 client pages · 475 with full contribution histories Vertical 03Revolving door
Cross-referenced registry of officials who move between Nevada government, regulated industries, and lobbying firms — sourced from 8.7K candidate filings and 7.6M corporate-officer records.
Built — 104 trifecta matches · 123 candidates → lobbyists Vertical 04Regulatory capture
Current rosters of Nevada's regulatory boards with prior-employment cross-reference. Who is actually running the agencies that regulate Nevada's largest industries?
Built — 3 boards profiled (PUCN + Gaming Control + Gaming Commission) · 6 in queuePattern-level pages — how the machine actually moves
These pages slice the same data by mechanism rather than by individual lobbyist or client. Each surfaces a structural feature of the corporatocracy without editorial framing.
Firms
146 lobbying firms grouped by email domain — combined client lists, multi-rep clients, paid-vs-non-paid breakdown.
Government clients
72 public bodies (cities, courts, school districts, regulatory boards) that hire lobbyists with public funds.
Surveillance vendors
Companies selling monitoring/enforcement/ID/automated-camera technology that also lobby Nevada — Flock, SCRAM, Tanium, Axon, Verra, Smart Start, Intellicheck.
Federal lobbying
372 of Nevada's lobbyist-registry clients also appear in the U.S. Senate's Lobbying Disclosure Act database — the same entities lobbying Carson City and Washington at the same time.
Anomalies & research leads
Algorithmic detection across all NPE data: Benford's Law on contributions, donor-base concentration (HHI), Olson coalition-shell shared-officer detection, Louvain community clustering, Isolation Forest outliers. Research leads, not published claims.
Family + surname clusters
Verified Nevada political families (Hardy, Griffin, Laxalt) plus 30+ cross-firm surname research leads.
Tax credits & abatements
Catalogue of Nevada's transferable tax-credit programs and large project-specific abatements (Tesla, Apple, AB238 Summerlin Studios).
How to read this site
Capture in Nevada operates across both parties. Republicans and Democrats appear here whenever the public record places them in the network — that's the standard. No editorial framing replaces it.
Facts, not commentary
Statements about who lobbies, who donates, and who appoints whom are supported by the underlying record. Editorial framing is reserved for the methodology page where it's clearly labelled.
Sources welcome
If you have documents — contracts, emails, internal communications — the most secure way to reach us is the SecureDrop on Nevada Whistleblowers, run by us in another country with better privacy laws, on a host that has millions to battle regulators.
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