Sources

  • Campaign-finance disclosures are pulled from the Nevada Secretary of State's public filings, deduplicated through the cf_contributions_clean view (570K contributions after removing superseded reports and duplicate tuples).
  • Lobbyist data comes from the Nevada Legislature's LobbyistAndClients report for the active session (currently the 83rd, 2025).
  • Entity records for cross-referencing corporate donors and clients come from the Nevada Secretary of State's business-entity search system.
  • Regulatory-board profiles draw from each board's public roster, member bios, and prior-employment records.
  • Revolving-door timelines draw from official appointment records, legislative bios, the Nevada Lobbyist Registry, federal LDA filings, court filings, and where available officials' own publicly-posted career histories.
  • Federal lobbying cross-reference draws from the U.S. Senate's Lobbying Disclosure Act public API (lda.senate.gov/api/v1/). For every distinct client on the Nevada lobbyist registry we query the federal database by entity name; tokenwise high-confidence matches are surfaced on each client page and aggregated at /clients/federal-lobbying/.

What we publish, and what we don't

  • We publish facts. Names, amounts, dates, employer relationships, and registration status all come from filings on the public record.
  • We don't publish allegations as facts. If a tip can't be supported with a document or filing, we treat it as a lead for further reporting, not as a published claim.
  • We don't publish private personal information — home addresses (beyond what filings already disclose), unrelated family members, medical or sexual-orientation details, and similar.
  • We correct mistakes. If something on this site is wrong, the correction goes on the same page with the date.

Editorial stance

This is a non-partisan project. The corporatocracy in Nevada operates across both parties, and the public record reflects that. Where a Republican is the principal actor in a story, we report it. Where a Democrat is, we report that. Where both are, we report both.

Inclusion on this site is not an accusation of wrongdoing. The lobbyist registry includes lobbyists who lobby for non-profits and causes most readers will support; the donor list includes labor unions and educational associations alongside casinos and utilities. The pattern of money and influence is the story — not the moral character of any individual person on the list.

The intellectual framework

Each mechanism documented on this site descends from a named tradition in classical-liberal economics, public-choice theory, and constitutional originalism — Adam Smith on merchants in conspiracy, James Madison on faction, Frédéric Bastiat on the seen and the unseen, Friedrich Hayek on the knowledge problem, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock on public choice, Mancur Olson on concentrated benefits and dispersed costs, George Stigler on regulatory capture. The framework is laid out at /first-principles/ with verified quotations and a mapping from each thinker to the specific site page that documents the same pattern in 2026 Nevada.

What "donor cartel," "lobbyist," "revolving door," and "regulatory capture" mean here

Donor cartel is shorthand for the small set of entities that consistently appear at the top of Nevada's giving lists, cycle after cycle, often donating to candidates of both parties. The term is descriptive — it identifies a giving pattern.

Lobbyist is used here as Nevada law uses it (NRS 218H): a person who registers with the Legislature for the purpose of influencing legislative action. Paid, non-paid, intern, and military-veteran categories are all included.

Revolving door describes the documented movement of a single person between government, regulated industry, and lobbying roles — typically more than once.

Regulatory capture describes the condition where the people regulating an industry come predominantly from that industry, and where the regulator's positions consistently align with the regulated parties' positions. We document the membership; readers can assess the second half.

Election results pipeline (NV SOS)

Election results on politician pages come from the Nevada Secretary of State's ElectionSummary archive. We fetch every cycle from 1999 forward (49 statewide cycles plus the 1998 PDF-only general and primary), parse the per-race tables, and load winners + opponents + vote totals into our database. Results are refreshed automatically every Sunday by the nightly pipeline.

Three caveats readers should know:

  • ~70% Aurora match rate. When we join election results to a candidate's campaign-finance record in NV SOS Aurora, roughly 30% of historical races don't match cleanly. Unmatched rows fall into three buckets: federal candidates (filed with the FEC, not NV SOS), pre-2010 candidates (Aurora's digitization gap), and name-variant mismatches (nicknames, suffix changes, married-name transitions). We surface what we can; the gap is real and we're improving fuzzy matching in passes.
  • Multi-winner races (at-large boards). A handful of races — university Regents, State Board of Education seats, some at-large municipal boards — elect more than one winner from the same slate. Our current rendering marks the top vote-getter as won=true and the rest as opponents. Where N seats are at stake we are updating to flag all N winners; until that ships, results for ~20 historical races may understate the number of winners.
  • Ballot measures excluded. We index candidate races only. Yes-on-X / no-on-X ballot questions, recall questions, and bond questions are out of scope on this site — they live in the accountability reports for the relevant policy area instead of on politician pages.

Source protection

The most secure way to send us documents is the SecureDrop on Nevada Whistleblowers, hosted in another country with better privacy laws, on a host that has millions to battle regulators. We don't run a tip line on this site, and we don't keep server logs that could identify a source. See /tips for instructions.

Corrections and contact

If something on this site is wrong, please tell us — the most secure route is the same SecureDrop. For non-sensitive corrections, contact details are on /about.