The referendum that lost, and the $1.69 million raised to pass it
In 2022 Orange County asked voters for a penny on the sales tax — about $600 million a year for twenty years. A committee raised $1.69 million to persuade them. Eleven engineering firms that build transport infrastructure put in $220,000 of it. Voters said no.
Read the report →The county atlas
Florida has 67 counties. Each keeps its own campaign-finance filings, its own lobbyist register and its own board minutes. No state agency assembles them. We are working through them in population order.
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Type a county name, or select one on the map, to see what we have published and what is coming.
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| County | Status | Population | Records | Money traced | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Orange | Published | 1,472,810 | 120,672 | $31.25M | Report 02 |
| Lee | Published | 834,573 | 26,307 | $58.98M | Report 01 |
| Miami-Dade | Next | 2,686,867 | — | — | — |
| Broward | Queued | 1,947,026 | — | — | — |
| Palm Beach | Queued | 1,518,379 | — | — | — |
| Hillsborough | Queued | 1,515,904 | — | — | — |
| Duval | Queued | 1,038,127 | — | — | — |
| Pinellas | Queued | 962,003 | — | — | — |
How we work
We read the filings
Every figure comes from a document a candidate, committee, lobbyist or clerk was legally required to file. Not from press accounts, not from aggregators, not from anyone's summary. Where a record is incomplete, we say which one.
Records, not allegations
We report what a document shows, never what we suspect it implies. We do not call lawful conduct a crime. Exculpatory facts — recusals, abstentions, counter-examples — are published beside the finding, not omitted from it.
We publish what we don't know
Entity matching is imperfect, filings arrive late, and some records cannot be resolved. Each report states its own error bars. Concentration figures are reported as upper bounds, because that is what they are.
Standing
The Institute takes no money from any party, campaign, candidate, committee or officeholder, and endorses none of them. Nobody outside the Institute reviews a report before it is published.
Our findings have so far been uncomfortable for both parties, which is the only external validation this kind of work can honestly claim. In Lee County the concentration ran through Republican committees. In Orange County the largest single account is the Democratic Executive Committee. We follow the filings.
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