With high profile terrorist attacks in Paris, San Bernardino and elsewhere, 2015 was the year the world turned its attention more fully to the self-styled Islamic State. It was also the year that Americans confronted the possibility that terrorists could wreak even more havoc at home.

The Center for Public Integrity traced where the Islamic State's ammo comes from in 2014 and this year wrote about a grave setback in the U.S. military's effort to take on the group. Through a series of investigative and revelatory articles, it also brought new attention to the possibility that terrorists might get ahold of nuclear explosive materials, due to lax security controls in a handful of key nations.

From South Africa to Iraq and from Moldova to India, here are some of the most alarming stories we published about terrorism and nuclear-related risks in 2015.

South African facilities present a ripe target for nuclear terrorists

The Obama administration has twice asked South African President Jacob Zuma to hand over the country’s supply of weapons-grade uranium. He did not agree.

South Africa’s nuclear stockpile is among the most vulnerable to theft in the world, U.S. officials say.

The complicated fight against the Islamic State through one fighter’s capture

Lieutenant Farhan al-Jassem signed up to join a U.S.-backed force against the Islamic State. He was captured in July by the Nusra Front, another anti-ISIS group.

It’s a cautionary, close-up tale about the long war against the Islamic State, which has been undermined by conflicting goals and wary allegiances.

Experts say someone is looking for a buyer for this nuclear material

Material seized in separate arrests by police in three countries, spanning more than a decade, has led experts and intelligence officials to conclude that a significant quantity of Soviet-era nuclear materials are on the loose.

India's push for nuclear power has its residents, close neighbors and the West worried

If India continues to power itself with coal, it could be the world's No. 1 polluter by 2050. But the country's answer to this global concern -- to build dozens of new nuclear reactors over the next two decades -- is beset by serious problems.

Toxic and radioactive pollution from India's uranium mining and processing are harming citizens, according to Indian and Japanese experts. The country's explansion of its military nuclear program has displaced tribal communities and alarmed Western analysts. And India's security precautions for nuclear explosive materials are considered far too lax by U.S. government officials, who say they have been unable to persuade India to take the issue more seriously.

Paul Spencer, a teacher and part-time pecan farmer in Arkansas, drafted a ballot measure for 2016 to reform the state’s campaign finance laws so his fellow voters could know who paid for election ads on TV.

But he and fellow activists there knew they couldn’t do it alone. They sought the help of national election-reform groups because in Arkansas, as in many other states, initiatives can cost millions of dollars to pass.

Liberal groups working at the national level are using state ballot initiatives as their weapon of choice for 2016, but given the costs, they’re carefully planning exactly where to push these measures. And Spencer’s Arkansas proposal didn’t make the cut for 2016.

That top-down approach seems ironic. The initiative process was put in place at the beginning of the 20th century as a way for local citizens such as Spencer to band together to pass laws. And voters on the ground may not be aware that national groups are helping fuel the ballot fights in their backyards.

Still, national liberal leaders see state ballot measures as their best option for winning on some issues. Dismayed at their prospects in Congress and in Republican-dominated state legislatures, national liberal groups plan to use ballot initiatives to push raising the minimum wage in Maine, legalizing marijuana in Massachusetts, closing gun sale loopholes in Nevada, guarding endangered species in Oregon — and other campaigns in at least eight additional states.

National conservative groups, meanwhile, seem poised to play defense, setting up a battle of outsiders on state playing fields. In March, Republican-linked politicos launched the Center for Conservative Initiatives in Washington, D.C., to counter the liberal ballot measures they anticipate will arrive in record numbers nationwide in 2016.

“Liberal groups have been forced to spend heavily on ballot initiatives in an effort to circumvent elected representatives because in states around the country the public has overwhelmingly rejected their out-of-touch candidates and messages,” said the Center’s leader, Matt Walter, in an email. 

The push from outsiders to pass pet policies via the ballot has occurred before, on everything from land conservation in North Dakota to how to cage chickens in California, sometimes leading to big-money fights between corporations, advocacy groups and others.

“There’s this perception out there that the initiative process is all about the little guy,” said Jennie Bowser, a consultant who for many years studied ballot measures for the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures. “But the truth of the matter is that it’s a big business. It’s really well organized, and it’s really well funded. And it is very, very rarely a group of local citizens who get together and try to make a difference.”

Passing popular ideas

In 2014, when a Republican wave gave conservatives more U.S. Senate seats and governors’ mansions, left-leaning activists still managed to notch victories for the minimum wage, gun control and marijuana legalization through ballot measures in Nebraska, South Dakota, Illinois, Arkansas, Washington, Oregon, Alaska and the District of Columbia.

In 2015, they followed with wins for campaign-finance reform in Seattle and Maine.

Those successes, as well as the chance to draw more left-leaning voters to the polls, are encouraging liberal activists to push hard on the 2016 ballot.

This year, national liberal groups are especially focused on issues that prove popular in polls but that politicians have been loath to work on, such as gun control and marijuana legalization. Republicans, who generally dislike both ideas, control 30 state legislatures.

“These are issues that voters have said are very important to them in previous elections, yet nothing has changed,” said Justine Sarver, the director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, which helps coordinate liberal ballot efforts.

Her group, based in Washington, D.C., plans to use 2016 to push back on conservative state legislatures but hasn’t yet announced which 2016 initiative campaigns it will aid. Though it does not disclose its donors, the group has been listed as a beneficiary of the Democracy Alliance, a network of deep-pocketed Democratic contributors including financier George Soros and San Francisco hedge fund manager Tom Steyer. (The Center for Public Integrity receives funding from the Open Society Foundations, which Soros funds. A complete list of Center for Public Integrity funders is found here.)

Everytown for Gun Safety, the pro-gun-control group with millions in funding from billionaire Michael Bloomberg, is already backing measures in two states.  A Nevada initiative, which has secured its place on the 2016 ballot, would eliminate loopholes that allow firearms to be sold without background checks online and at gun shows. Activists are gathering signatures for a similar measure in Maine.

“The gun lobby can bully politicians, but it can’t bully the American people,” said Kate Folmar, deputy communications director for the group based in New York City. “And what we know is that Americans overwhelmingly support background checks.”

What national support amounts to in Nevada is money and staff expertise: Everytown for Gun Safety’s action fund gave nearly $2 million to the group set up to push the gun measure, more than 80 percent of its funding so far. It also gave $76,000 in staff time, according to state records. And the local organization, Nevadans for Background Checks, brought in more national experts when it paid a D.C.-based signature gathering firm $1.2 million to help collect more than 100,000 signatures to make the 2016 ballot.

Not all measures are as far along as the gun proposals in Nevada and Maine, as several states do not have signature collection deadlines until the spring or summer. And initiatives are not an option in every state — only 24 states allow citizen-initiated proposals on the ballot.

But marijuana legalization measures backed by the national Marijuana Policy Project are taking shape in five states — Arizona, California, Maine, Massachusetts and Nevada. Activists with ties to the Sierra Club have announced plans for measures to block fracking in Colorado and collected signatures to support solar power in Florida. Various national groups have voiced support for minimum wage initiatives popping up across the country — including proposals for $15 per hour in California, Missouri, Oregon and Washington, D.C., and $12 per hour in Ohio and Maine.

Aside from legislative roadblocks, observers see one more reason for left-leaning groups to place big bets on ballot initiatives in 2016: Liberal measures in key states could boost Democratic turnout in the presidential election, in the same way measures blocking gay marriage are credited with helping re-elect President George W. Bush in 2004. 

“We believe raising the minimum wage is good policy but also helps voters to engage in the political process,” said Paul Sonn, general counsel of the National Employment Law Project, a group that advises initiative groups and has ties to unions and the Democracy Alliance. “For some of the political players, that’s sort of an attraction to putting populist measures on the ballot.”

Top-down money decisions

National liberal groups are now calculating which states could deliver wins and which local activists deserve financial help. Though national groups have helped pass state initiatives for decades — going as far back as national reform groups that championed tax-cutting measures in California and elsewhere in the late ’70s and ’80s — this year left-leaning organizations seem especially focused on coordinating strategies for where to parachute in with resources.

The Humane Society Legislative Fund is already planning to work on several measures in 2016, including an initiative to help endangered animals in Oregon and another to give certain farm animals more room to move around in Massachusetts. John Goodwin, its political director, said his group seeks to have a national game plan for choosing when and where to push measures.

“We like to have had the right policy experts and legal experts be involved when these measures are being drafted so we get it right,” Goodwin said. “And we like to poll to make sure that these initiatives are going to be supported when they go to the ballot. So all of those are factors in determining when we will move forward with supporting a ballot initiative.”

The most limiting factor for sponsoring measures, liberal groups say, is money. Passing a ballot initiative in many states is now a multimillion-dollar endeavor. Professional signature gathering and television advertising alone can eat up campaign budgets.

“There’s limited resources. So we have to be smart and strategic,” said Karen Hobert Flynn, a senior executive at Common Cause, a Washington, D.C.-based election reform group that is still deciding which campaign finance proposals it will back in 2016.

When national groups like Common Cause do get involved in state ballot fights, voters may not know the efforts aren’t entirely local. For example, two committees — Maine Citizens for Clean Elections and Mainers for Accountable Elections— worked to pass a campaign-finance reform initiative in that state in November. But while the groups received hundreds of small donations from Maine residents, most of their 2015 funds came from out-of-state donors, including national advocacy groups such as Common Cause and Every Voice, as well as unions and philanthropists.

National groups emphasize that just because they are providing money and guidance doesn’t mean all ballot measures come from wonks in Washington. Goodwin says the Humane Society always works with local activists, and Sarver said the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center’s approach is collaborative.

Defensive line

Some national conservative groups are already gearing up to play defense, though they are staying mum about the details.

The newly formed Center for Conservative Initiatives announced broad plans to battle liberals on the ballot, fighting bureaucratic growth and promoting free enterprise, but hasn’t yet disclosed what issues it will work on in 2016. The Center is run by a nonprofit associated with the Republican State Leadership Committee, a political group that works to elect Republicans to state offices and whose largest funder is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

So far the group has disclosed opposition to only one measure — a 2015 initiative in Mississippi that would have allowed courts to enforce a school funding law.

In Florida, where a broad coalition is backing a measure to allow neighbors to sell solar power to each other, the conservative group created by billionaires Charles and David Koch, Americans for Prosperity, has criticized solar power proposals in the state. But a spokesman said the group hasn’t yet taken a position on the initiative itself.

Corporate interests are also preparing to block some liberal measures. In Colorado, environmental activists announced plans to push anti-fracking measures, and energy companies have already poured millions of dollars into a committee to oppose them, according to state records. They gave more than $1 million to the committee from July to September alone.

The threat of conservative pushback has scared some groups away from getting involved with local efforts to get measures to the ballot, since more money would be required to overcome opposition.

That’s what happened when Spencer asked national groups to help with his initiative to disclose election ad funding in Arkansas. Several groups said no.

“They looked at other states that had similar measures and similar language, and I think they were a little bit frightened by the potential pushback from groups like Americans for Prosperity or the Koch brothers,” Spencer said. “They thought it was going to be a hard sell going to their funders.”

Spencer’s group recently gave up on the campaign-finance disclosure measure for 2016. He holds out hope that similar provisions could be included in another potential ballot initiative about ethics, put forward by other activists.

“I am personally disappointed how this effort has panned out here in Arkansas,” he said in an email, calling it emblematic of “top-down grass roots activism.”

This story was co-published with the Atlantic.

Legislators should rewrite state codes to reduce Virginia’s high rate of arresting young students, child legal-rights advocates argue in a new report.

Staff at the Virginia Legal Aid Justice Center contend that the commonwealth’s existing statutes allow police to easily intervene in school discipline disputes and criminalize typical childhood misbehavior.

Many Virginia schools are “starved” for funding and lack key educational staff, yet tens of millions of dollars are spent statewide each year on school policing that’s become “a recipe for disaster,” according to the Justice Center’s report, “Protecting Childhood: A Blueprint for Developmentally Appropriate School Policing in Virginia.”  

The comprehensive report — released Wednesday — was produced by the legal-aid group’s JustChildren program attorneys with the assistance of staff at the University of Virginia School of  Law. JustChildren lawyers often represent special-needs students in disputes at schools, and have become increasingly concerned that school policing has turned routine behavior problems into crimes.

Last year, the report notes, Virginia “more fully began to join the nationwide movement for school discipline reform” after a Center for Public Integrity investigation found that Virginia was the nation’s leader in the rate of school referrals of students to local law-enforcement agencies.

Virginia’s statewide rate of referral was nearly 16 students for every 1,000, compared to the national rate of about six students per 1,000, according to the Center’s analysis of 2011-2012 national data. Moreover, the rates at which disabled students and African-American pupils were arrested and sent to court — both nationally and in Virginia — were disproportionately higher than their overall percentages of the school population.  

Local Virginia police data gathered by the Center showed that the vast majority of student arrests were for misdemeanor allegations of disorderly conduct and “simple assault.” Some 12-year-olds were charged with “obstruction of justice” and resisting arrest if they clenched a fist during interactions with school police.

In one case, in Henrico County, a 12-year-old 6^th grader with autism who had torn down some posters was subsequently pushed down by several officers, handcuffed and arrested  for felony assault on an cop because he touched an officer.   

The boy’s mother, Ali Nelson, told the Center: “The school resource officer said that as soon as he (her son) put his hands on him it was a felony and he had to arrest him.”  

The school district declined to comment on the case. But in August, after the Center published Nelson’s story, Henrico County Police Chief Doug Middleton announced new policies limiting his officers’ involvement at schools and told the Center that educators had become too “dependent” on calling cops for minor discipline problems.

In another case the Center revealed, 11-year-old  Kayleb Moon-Robinson, who also has autism, was  charged with felony assault on a police officer after he walked out of 6^th grade class without permission.

A school cop grabbed him and Kayleb struggled to break free. Just days before, Kayleb had been charged with disorderly conduct after the same school police officer saw him kick a trash can at his school in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Kayleb has been forced to go to court multiple times over the last year — with jailing a distinct possibility — and his mother said he’s been stigmatized and shunned by kids who called him a “criminal.”

One of the “Protecting Childhood” report’s recommendations is for Virginia’s General Assembly to eliminate school-based “disorderly conduct” as a predicate for charging students with a crime on campuses.

Another recommendation is to remove misdemeanors and “non-crimes,” such as cyberbullying, from a list of 40 types of school-based acts that state code currently requires educators to report to law enforcement officials. Once the acts are reported, arrests and charges often follow.

“School and law enforcement personnel report that this requirement (to report acts) is incredibly burdensome, undercuts the exercise of their professional judgment in handling minor offenses, and can be distracting from the work of maintaining safety and order in the schools,” the new report argues.

The report also calls for a state requirement that school resource officers receive specialized training for working with children. Only if a position is funded through a state grants program does an officer currently have to receive a course that includes some training for working with children.

Legislators, the report’s authors also argue, should also rewrite a statute that currently paves the way for police to get pulled into typical behavior problems.

School police, the statute says, “shall be employed to help ensure safety, to prevent truancy and violence in schools, and to enforce school board rules and codes of student conduct.” The language authorizing intervention to enforce rules and codes of conduct should be eliminated, the authors of the report argue.

By giving police responsibility to enforce discipline, the report’s authors point out, Virginia’s statute conflicts with recommendations from the National Association of School Resource Officers — a professional group — and the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice, which both recommend that school police not be involved in enforcing school rules.

Jason Langberg, one of the report’s authors and a JustChildren program education advocate, said he believes advocates can find bipartisan support for reforms in the legislature.  In fact, a new bipartisan coalition in Virginia issued a report last fall calling for school-policing and juvenile-justice reforms.

“We anticipate some success because much of what we’re proposing are common sense solutions,” Langberg said. “Both (political) sides realize that unnecessarily funneling children from schools to the justice system not only hurts children and school climate, but also is fiscally irresponsible.”

After the Center’s report came out in April, along with a Reveal national radio segment, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, asked members of his cabinet to recommend policy changes in response to the Center’s findings.

“Virginia parents send their children to school to learn, not to end up in the juvenile justice system.” Brian Coy, McAuliffe’s spokesman, told the Center.

As cabinet members subsequently told the Center, McAuliffe started a “Classrooms, Not Courtrooms” initiative that is offering school districts free retraining for school police and educators, as well as financial support for discipline methods considered effective alternatives to suspensions and calling in police.

The initiative also is urging school districts to adopt updated school-police agreements, or memoranda of understanding, that formally limit police involvement on campuses to serious crimes.  

In response to the Center report, scattered communities, from Lynchburg to Richmond, have also voluntarily adopted their own reforms aimed at eliminating unnecessary arrests at schools, setting age limits for arrests and developing alternatives to sending kids into court.

But the JustChildren report argues that statewide standards are critical to ensuring that children are treated equitably regardless of where they live. The report has been delivered to the governor’s cabinet and to lawmakers. The report’s recommendations, the authors argue, “will help ensure that school policing laws, policies, and practices are fair to students” while “still allowing security personnel to carry out their purposes more effectively.”

The nation’s federal campaign and election regulator could soon have a new address — and it wouldn’t necessarily be in Washington, D.C.

Federal Election Commission officials confirmed to the Center for Public Integrity that a move appears increasingly likely since a real estate investment group controlled by Jordache Enterprises— best known for its designer jeans— purchased the agency’s headquarters building last year.

The FEC’s lease expires in September 2017; the stately, nine-story structure the commission occupies sits atop prime real estate at 999 E St. Northwest near Washington, D.C.’s burgeoning Gallery Place-Chinatown district.

Short-term, moving to a new building could create yet more inconvenience and tumult for the agency, which is already struggling with internal ideological battles and low employee morale. Long-term, however, a new facility could upgrade employees’ office environment and save taxpayers money.

“My gut tells me that the FEC, they’re going to go, but I can’t tell you exactly whether they’re going to stay or going to go,” said Jonathan Bennett of Jordache Enterprises’ Nakash Holdings.

FEC commissioners aren’t sure, either.

“It’s up in the air. There are still several shoes left to drop,” said FEC Chairman Matthew Petersen, a Republican.

Democratic Commissioner Ann Ravel, whose tenure as agency chairperson ended last week, said it’s “less likely” that the FEC will stay put and “more likely” it’ll move to a yet-to-be-determined location.

This much is certain: the FEC’s current headquarters is one pricey piece of property.

Jordache Enterprises, which owns several dozen hotel, resort, residential and office properties, purchased the FEC’s headquarters building for $83.5 million, according to District of Columbia property records.

In 2015, the District’s Office of Tax and Revenue valued 999 E St. NW at $77,100,800.

“The building — we love it. We love the location, the proximity to the Smithsonian, it’s all great,” Bennett said.

Created in 1975, the FEC has operated out of its current building since 1985. Before that, a building at 1325 K St. NW in Washington, D.C., housed the agency’s operations.

The federal government’s General Services Administration is responsible for negotiating with Jordache Enterprises and its development partner, Douglas Development Corp.

If lease negotiations fail, the GSA must secure alternate office space for the FEC, whose roughly 350 employees enforce and administer the nation’s federal election laws or support such efforts.

A headquarters move could mean the FEC — likeitsneighbor across E Street, the FBI — ditches its downtown digs for a location in Virginia or Maryland, far outside Washington, D.C.’s core.

It’s also entirely possible the FEC could move elsewhere within the District of Columbia, which appears to be GSA’s preference.

The GSA recently published a “presolicitation” notice indicating it’s seeking between 87,000 square feet and 105,000 square feet of space to lease at a building that’s within the District of Columbia and a half mile of a Metrorail train station. A formal request for proposals is forthcoming.

The FEC today leases nearly 137,000 square feet, and GSA records indicate its current annual rent is about $5.35 million.

"Currently, it is premature to provide information pertaining to … the movement of their headquarters,” GSA spokeswoman Kamara Jones said.

Securing federal government office space isn’t cheap.

For example, taxpayers have already funded $5 million in "lease expiration and replacement lease expenses" related to the FEC’s headquarters.

But Republican FEC Commissioner Lee Goodman says finding a new headquarters could provide long-term benefits, both in terms of lower costs and improved working conditions.

Goodman described the FEC’s current office space as “dingy,” even “junky” in places, with “needlessly wide hallways and large offices from a different era.”

A modern office “would boost morale of the people who work here,” said Goodman, adding that federal officials involved with the potential move tell him they’re hoping to identify suitable space “within a five or six block radius of our current location.”

Ravel agreed: “In many ways, our building doesn’t serve our purposes.”

Republican FEC Commissioner Caroline Hunter says she’d prefer the FEC stay in its current building, particularly given its attractive location and proximity to public transit stations. If not, “I hope that we can stay in Washington, because I think that’s best for the members of the public that come in to meet with us,” Hunter said.

The 999 E St. NW building houses just one other tenant beside the FEC: a street-level Hard Rock Cafe.

Hard Rock Cafe spokeswoman Amanda Early said the restaurant chain “does not have an update to share” about the future of its Washington, D.C., location, although Bennett from Jordache Enterprises called the music-themed restaurant a “great tenant.”

Were the FEC to occupy its current address past 2017, Bennett said his company “would definitely improve” the interior — something Goodman insisted is essential.

In the meantime, expect negotiations between the federal government and Jordache Enterprises to begin soon but last throughout the year.

“There isn’t a sense of urgency yet on anyone’s part,” Bennett said.

The toxic morass that was America’s nuclear weapons complex is no secret. Hazardous conditions in places like the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant  in Ohio moved Congress in 2000 to create a compensation program for former workers who developed illnesses that may have been caused by radiation or chemical exposures.

The program, run by the U.S. Department of Labor, assumes that conditions significantly improved at nuclear sites after 1995 and processes claims accordingly. A new report by federal health investigators, however, casts doubt on that assumption.

The report from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, dated December 21, 2015, summarizes the results of a NIOSH inspection at Portsmouth begun two years earlier. The Center for Public Integrity, which highlighted historical problems at the site in an article last month, obtained it this week from a former worker.

The most notable finding: air sampling in Building 326 of the now-closed uranium enrichment plant, undergoing decontamination and decommissioning, showed the presence of hydrogen fluoride, a potentially lethal gas, in concentrations up to 30 times the NIOSH “ceiling limit,” described as “a value that should never be exceeded.” Apart from its capacity to kill, hydrogen fluoride, commonly known as HF, can cause chronic lung disease, skin damage and blindness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Investigators also noted that there was no sampling for nitrogen dioxide, another dangerous gas. Acute effects of exposure include vomiting, labored breathing and dizziness, according to the CDC; there also can be long-term effects on the immune system and the lungs.

Hydrogen fluoride, a remnant of production in Building 326, can be unleashed by the cutting of pipes, compressors and converters. Nitrogen dioxide is generated by the cutting itself.

The NIOSH team met with 16 people who worked at Portsmouth at the time, 10 of whom “expressed concerns about poor communication between management and employees and concerns about retaliation for reporting safety problems,” the report says. “Concerns included having inadequate information about chemical(s) used, chemical exposures, and potential health effects.” Five workers reported rashes they believed to be work-related.

“Several employees expressed concern that they felt rushed to complete job tasks and that some managers placed production goals ahead of safety,” the report says. “Employees believed these problems have led to near misses and accidents.”

The Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program is intended to provide payments to and cover the health care of people harmed by working at nuclear-weapons sites. Many claimants and some members of Congress find the program deeply flawed and question the Labor Department’s rationale for denying claims.

A year-old department circular directs claims examiners to presume that no significant exposure to any toxic agents occurred after 1995 unless there is “compelling data to the contrary.” Advocates who have pushed the Labor Department to reverse the policy say the NIOSH report is the latest example of recent problems. They worry about undocumented hazards going unnoticed.

“This is probably not an isolated incident,” said Deb Jerison, director of the Energy Employees Claimant Assistance Project, whose physicist father worked at the Mound Laboratory in Ohio and died of bone cancer. “If people don’t look, they won’t find.”

Labor Department spokeswoman Amanda McClure said the NIOSH report doesn’t require a policy change.

The department’s circular, based on Energy Department efforts to improve safety throughout the weapons complex, “does not negate the fact that there may have been higher levels of exposures at certain sites in individual cases after 1995,” McClure wrote in an email. The agency “takes those circumstances into account when they arise, and we will take NIOSH's Portsmouth facility report into consideration on a case-by-case basis.”

The dismantling of the Portsmouth plant involves more than 2,000 workers and is being overseen by Fluor BWXT, a contractor for the U.S. Department of Energy. In a letter to NIOSH dated December 3, 2015, Fluor BWXT said it has “robust” industrial hygiene and hazard-communication programs and closely monitors workplace hazards. The company said it had taken more than 57,000 air samples for radiological hazards in Building 326 since 2012. These samples, combined with urine testing, “have shown no reportable internal exposures” to workers, it said.

In an interview, Bob French, Fluor BWXT’s environment, safety, health and quality director, said NIOSH was invited to Portsmouth in 2013 by both the company and the United Steelworkers union.

Last month’s report brought no surprises because NIOSH kept Fluor BWXT officials apprised during its two-year inquiry. As NIOSH would raise safety issues, the company would correct them, French said.

“There’s nothing we want more than to assure the safety of our workers,” he said. Building 326 is targeted for demolition in June 2017.

Energy Department spokeswoman Joshunda Sanders wrote in an email that the agency "considers worker health and safety to be a top priority, and we take all recommendations to improve safety seriously. This [NIOSH] letter is being reviewed in that context."

Jeff Walburn, a former security guard at Portsmouth, said he found the NIOSH report disconcerting.

On the morning of July 26, 1994, Walburn was working in the L-Cage – a storage area for contaminated liquid waste – in Building 326. The plant, then still in production, was operated by Lockheed Martin.

The atmosphere suddenly changed, Walburn said, and he became agitated. Another guard was in the same area.  “It was like we were being stung by bees all over,” Walburn said. His lungs were burned. His hair fell out in clumps. He wound up in the emergency room and spent 11 days in the hospital and two months recovering after that.

Walburn blamed his injury on HF exposure. NIOSH’s findings suggest that similar risks remain for decommissioning workers, he said.

“There are thousands of miles of pipe and pockets of gas trapped within those thousands of miles of pipe,” said Walburn, who brought an unsuccessful lawsuit against Lockheed Martin. “The 326 [building] is a catastrophe waiting to happen.”

In a written statement to the Center last month, Lockheed Martin said it had investigated worker allegations of safety lapses and “could not substantiate” them.

Just as fast as Chris Christie rose in New Hampshire presidential polls, one Republican opponent’s super PAC cavalry is attempting to knock the New Jersey governor’s popularity back down.

A pair of Conservative Solutions PAC ads, which are airing this week in New Hampshire and surrounding markets, avoid criticizing frontrunner Donald Trump, but instead question Christie’s conservative record.  One ad asserts that Christie “could well be Obama’s favorite Republican.”

Conservative Solutions PAC exists for one purpose: supporting Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida.

“One high tax, Common Core, liberal energy loving, Obamacare Medicaid expanding president is enough,” one ad’s narrator says. Another blasts Christie's leadership.

Christie’s official campaign responded on Wednesday with its own ad in which Christie says Republicans have “the moral duty to work together.”

Christie, however, wasn’t particularly high on Rubio when asked by Bloomberg’s “With All Due Respect” program about Conservative Solutions PAC’s ad blitz.

“It's really important that if Senator Rubio would show up for work every once in a while — he only has one job,” Christie said, referring to Rubio’s less-than-stellar Senate attendancerecord.

Christie, whose own absence from New Jersey has been noticed, added that he “works every day for the people of New Jersey as governor.”

Christie is just two points behind Rubio in the Granite State, according to Real Clear Politics’ most recent aggregation of New Hampshire polls. 

The ad’s sponsor

Conservative Solutions PAC hasn’t spent nearly as much money on TV ads as Right to Rise USA, the super PAC behemoth supporting Republican Jeb Bush — easily the top ad sponsor in the presidential primary.

But since December, Conservative Solutions PAC has ramped up its ad spending, airing ads in key presidential primary and caucus states such as Iowa, South Carolina and New Hampshire.

Conservative Solutions PAC, just like all super PACs, may raise and spend as much money as it sees fit — a boon to wealthy donors who may only give $2,700 per election to candidates’ own campaigns.

While Conservative Solutions PAC must disclose its donors, its sister “social welfare” nonprofit — Conservative Solutions Project — does not, meaning the nonprofit’s donors are unknown.

The Conservative Solutions duo is responsible for more than half of all pro-Rubio ads to date, including ones sponsored by Rubio’s own campaign committee.

In December and January so far, the Rubio super PAC aired more than 2,600 TV ads — or one ad aired every 20 minutes. Its sister nonprofit has aired nearly 5,000 ads overall.

Together, these two pro-Rubio groups account for 12 percent of all TV ads aired in the Republican primary race, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of data from media tracking firm Kantar Media/CMAG.

Kantar Media/CMAG monitors television ads that run on local broadcast TV in all 211 media markets, as well as national network and national cable TV. It does not monitor local cable stations or track digital advertising.

Who’s behind it?

Several well-known Republican operatives who run the pro-Rubio Conservative Solutions PAC once worked for the presidential campaigns of George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush. This time, though, they’re forsaking the Bush family by not supporting Jeb Bush.

One of the leaders of Conservative Solutions PAC is J. Warren Tompkins, who has worked on Bush campaigns since the 1980s. He is currently a partner at consulting firm First Tuesday Strategies.

Leading the Conservative Solutions PAC’s ad strategy is Chris Mottola, a well-established ad operative who was initially expected to be pro-Jeb Bush.

Rounding out Bush alums is Jeff Sadosky, who is Conservative Solutions PAC’s communications strategist. Sadosky worked for George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign.

Money in

Through June, Conservative Solutions PAC raised $31.9 million.

But since, that number has likely surged, as this fundraising figure from the Federal Election Commission came in months before billionaire Paul Singer endorsed Rubio. (Most super PACs aren’t required to detail their donors during late 2015 until later this month.)

Conservative Solutions PAC’s known bankrollers include several big names. Among them: billionaire Floridian Norman Braman, whose donated $5 million over time through June. Braman owns the largest car dealership in Florida.

The top single donation — $2.5 million — comes from Besilu Stables LLC., which is owned by Florida healthcare businessman Benjamin Leon.

Other companies donated six-figure amounts as well, including one of the nation’s largest for-profit private prison companies, GEO Group, Inc. It gave the super PAC $100,000.

Florida Crystals Corp., a sugar company, also donated $100,000. Florida Crystals Corp. is owned by the Fangul brothers — like Rubio, Cuban-Americans — who head a sugar conglomerate comprised of subsidiaries such as Domino Sugar.

Money out

The ad frenzy cost the pro-Rubio super PAC an estimated $1 million in production and placement costs, with ads airing in New England television markets. The ads come after Christie’s newfound success in New Hampshire — a key state in the presidential primary contest.

Conservative Solutions PAC was hoarding the contents of its war chest until a couple of months ago. But no longer: The group aired its first ad in December, according to data from ad tracking firm Kantar Media/CMAG.

Why to watch this group

In a race where seven out of 10 ads in the Republican presidential primary are sponsored by outside groups such as super PACs, the pro-Rubio group has become a significant player, evident by notable ad buys in December and January.

And as primary season nears, viewers in key states can expect to see more negative ads.

Up until recent months, candidates’ super PAC ads have been overwhelmingly positive, touting the character and policies of the Republicans candidates they support.

Now though, this trend has begun to reverse.

The pro-Bush Right to Rise USA also spent $1 million late last month in negative ads attacking Rubio, Christie and Kasich. In the first four days of this month, 25 percent of presidential race-related ads aired were either negative or of a mixed tone, according to Kantar Media/CMAG.

It’s early January, when New Year’s resolutions seem attainable, extra pounds from the holidays losable, and sound policy from new state legislative sessions at least possible.  By now, 14 state capitals have welcomed their lawmakers back to town, and before the month is out, another 23 sessions will begin.

Over the next few weeks, legislators from Albany to Anchorage will introduce thousands of bills covering all sorts of topics. And in a handful of states, including New York, South Carolina and New Mexico, there’s a particular focus on ethics and open government — subjects covered in depth by the State Integrity Investigation, a data-driven evaluation and ranking of state government transparency and accountability published in November by the Center and Global Integrity.

On Tuesday, Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri said ethics reform would be his top priority this year, and called on the legislature to enact limits on campaign contributions, a ban on gifts from lobbyists and a halt to the “revolving door” of lawmakers becoming lobbyists immediately after leaving office. Each of those issues contributed to Missouri’s D- grade from the State Integrity Investigation. The project detailed the scope of the conflicts of interest and back-room dealings that plague state governments nationwide.

The investigation has yielded calls for reform in several states, and as Missouri makes clear, the project can also help point officials and advocates toward solutions and “best practices.” The state grades are based on 245 “indicators” of openness and accountability — whether lawmakers must disclose their finances, for example, or whether ethics watchdogs have adequate funding — which are divided into 13 categories. There’s a wealth of data behind each of those indicators. Here’s a guide for how to find it using our interactive app.

We ranked the states from top (Alaska) to bottom (Michigan) based on the laws and systems in place to promote transparency and prevent corruption. But the interactive app also allows users to rank the states by each of the 13 categories, so a reform-minded lawmaker in Mississippi, for example, which ranked last in the category for political financing, could  easily find which states scored the best in that category and understand exactly why.

There are two ways to sort by category: either by using the drop-down menu below the map:

…or by clicking on the section of any state’s wheel that represents the given category:

Either method will sort the states by rank, listing Massachusetts — which scored a 92, or an A, in political financing — first, and Mississippi — which managed just a 34, or an F — last. Why did Massachusetts score so high in this category? Just click on the state’s wheel, or on its box in the map above, to find out.

Massachusetts’ state page, with the article below and the expandable report card above, shows the grade, score and rank for every category. All 13 are expandable with the click of a mouse, revealing each of the indicators used to generate the category score.

And here lies the utility of the State Integrity Investigation for those seeking changes. Before the project’s first go-round in 2012, reporters and editors with the Center and Global Integrity interviewed nearly 100 experts in state government — including public officials, academics and advocates — to compile a list of the key indicators of government transparency and ethics. Last year, we returned to many of those experts and to some new ones to refine and edit the list. The results: 245 questions that ask about the laws on the books (“in law” indicators) and how those laws are implemented and enforced (“in practice” indicators).

Experienced journalists in each state conducted extensive research and reporting before scoring the questions based on specific criteria (see our methodology for more on scoring). Reporters were required to provide explanations for the score and also to list all of their sources, including links to state laws.

So, by clicking on the political finance category in Massachusetts, for example, a Mississippi lawmaker who wants to improve that state’s campaign finance system could see that the Bay State earned top spot partly because it places limits on donations to candidates and parties from individuals, political action committees and lobbyists, and because those limits are relatively effective. The lawmaker could click on the indicator asking about limits on contributions from PACs, for example, to see an explanation of the law as well as a link to its actual text.

The lawmaker could also scroll to the last question in the category to learn about how Massachusetts makes political finance records available to the public in so-called open data format, which allows people to download and sort the data. Similar stores of information and links lie behind every indicator, in every category, in every state. Readers can also download the full dataset here.

As for any other New Year’s resolutions, though, reform-minded lawmakers are on their own.

A sweeping anti-corruption measure that was inspired by a Center for Public Integrity report will appear on the ballot this year in South Dakota. The proposal, initiated by a bi-partisan group of former politicians and a national advocacy group, was certified this week by the Secretary of State there.

The measure would address a wide range of issues that contributed to the state earning an F from the State Integrity Investigation, a comprehensive evaluation and assessment of state government accountability and transparency published in November by the Center and Global Integrity.

The ethics reform campaign was begun last summer by Rick Weiland, a former Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, and Don Frankenfeld, a Republican and former state senator, with the help of Represent.Us, a national advocacy group focused on fighting corruption in state and local government. A press release says the effort“was crafted in direct response” to the failing grade the state earned in the first State Integrity Investigation, in 2012. The group submitted some 25,000 signatures to the Secretary of State in November, nearly twice the number required to get on the ballot.

In an interview, Frankenfeld said the partnership with Represent.Us, which he said has provided much of the funding so far, could serve as a national model. “This is a homegrown effort, with grassroots origin, and it’s bipartisan,” he said. “The hope would be that we can pass a comprehensive reform measure here in South Dakota that would serve as a standard.”

Represent.Us, which bills itself as “fiercely nonpartisan” and has a board that draws from both sides of the political spectrum, has been organizing similar efforts on the local government level through chapters in California, New Jersey, Illinois and other states. In November, the Roanoke City Council, in Virginia, passed a resolution from the group supporting ethics reform in that state.

South Dakota ranked 47th in the 2015 State Integrity Investigation, earning failing grades in nine of 13 categories, as well as the overall grade of F. Lobbyists there only have to report scant detail about their activities, and citizens cannot access those reports online. There’s no ban on officials using campaign funds for personal purposes, and the state does not have an ethics commission to oversee public officials and lobbyists.

The South Dakota Government Accountability and Anti-Corruption Act, as the measure is called, would change much of that by creating an independent ethics commission, limiting gifts from lobbyists, placing lobbyist reports online and barring personal use of campaign funds, among other changes.

It’s not the first attempt at reform. Last year, in the shadow of an ongoing scandal involving high-ranking state officials, including former governor and current U.S. Senator Mike Rounds, House Democrats introduced a bill that would have created an independent ethics commission. The effort gained little support, however, and the bill was voted down in the House by a hefty margin.

While a ballot measure wouldn’t require any support from the public officials who would be overseen by the ethics commission, that doesn’t mean its chances are much better, said Jon Schaff, a professor of political science at Northern State University, in Aberdeen.

“The measure in total may be more complicated than people want to put up with,” he said, adding that voters generally lean against approving ballot measures. “People tend to vote no, and they tend to vote no particularly on things that are complicated.”

However, Schaff said the issues it covers could appeal to voters, something Frankenfeld and his group are counting on. Supporters are currently assembling a committee of prominent Democrats and Republicans to represent the campaign, but Frankenfeld said they’re not announcing the names yet. Once the committee is formed, he anticipates they’ll begin approaching business and civic groups, and eventually run ads in local media to build support. They’ll also try to raise money from “individual South Dakota donors,” he said, while continuing to rely on Represent.Us for the bulk of funding.

“I could pretend that we have a complete campaign plan in place, but we don’t.” Frankenfeld said. “First thing’s first, and we wanted to make sure we got on the ballot.”

A high-profile presidential candidate has seen a massive advertising blitz, yet his standing in the polls has barely budged.

No, it's not Republican Jeb Bush. Rather, it’s Bernie Sanders, who’s stealthily revved his advertising machine and is now out-gunning Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton on television.

In December alone, the Sanders campaign aired about 7,650 TV ads, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of broadcast and national cable ad data provided by Kantar Media/CMAG.

That’s about one TV ad every six minutes.

The Sanders campaign had eschewed TV advertising altogether until late last year.

This December blitz also amounts to nearly one-third more ads than the Clinton campaign, which aired about 5,860 TV ads last month — one every eight minutes.

The Sanders campaign is also, of late, pouring more cash into TV ads than Clinton.

Since early November, when Sanders’ first launched presidential campaign ads, his campaign has spent about $9.7 million, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of data provided by The Tracking Firm, a recently formed nonpartisan media tracking company headquartered in Washington, D.C.

During that same period, Clinton’s campaign spent only $7.4 million. (The Democratic Party front-runner has spent about $14 million on TV ads since the beginning of August.)

Yet most polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the bulk of these TV ads have been focused, show little fluctuation since Sanders’ started his advertising barrage. Those two states conduct the nation’s first presidential nominating contests next month.

In Iowa, Clinton maintains more than a 10-percentage point lead over Sanders, according to a Huffington Post average of recent polls.

In New Hampshire, which borders Vermont, the state Sanders represents in the U.S. Senate, the race is tighter.

The Huffington Post’s average of recent polls currently gives Sanders about a three-point lead— essentially unchanged since the start of November.

During August, Sanders led Clinton in eight of nine polls of Granite State voters. But his lead has narrowed ever since — especially following Vice President Joe Biden’s late October announcement that he would not run for president.

Sanders campaign spokesman Michael Briggs told the Center for Public Integrity that Sanders is “feeling good about his chances” in both Iowa and New Hampshire.

“These ads are helping,” Briggs said. “The more people know about Bernie and his ideas, the more people like him and the things he’s talking about doing to fix the rigged economy and changing the corrupt campaign finance system.”

But one professional ad tracker says Sanders’ ads, which have all cast the senator in a positive light, have not yet paid off.

“Those seeking evidence that TV ads aren’t having their typical impact this time around will find it twofold in the fact that Sanders’ ads don’t seem to be moving his numbers, after his numbers initially surged without any ads at all,” said Elizabeth Wilner, the senior vice president of Kantar Media who oversees its Campaign Media Analysis Group.

Overall, the Sanders campaign raised about $73 million in 2015, mostly from people contributing $200 or less. The Clinton campaign raised $112 million during that time — the bulk of which has come from people giving $1,000 or more.

“We do have the resources to wage a very serious campaign,” Briggs said, who also noted the campaign recently surpassed one million individual campaign donors.

Representatives of the Clinton campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

At this stage of the 2008 presidential campaign, Clinton had raised $118 million, while Barack Obama had raised about $104 million.

Clinton has also been buoyed by a network of super PACs, which can collect contributions of unlimited amounts.

So far, these groups — the most prominent of which is known as Priorities USA Action— have largely stayed off the TV airwaves. But they certainly have the resources to pound the Sanders campaign with incessant negative ads should they so choose.

Sanders has disavowed super PACs, although one super PAC connected to a nurses’ union has spent more than $800,000 on his behalf. The bulk of that money has supported printing costs and a pro-Sanders bus tour, not TV ads.

This story was co-published with TIME and Al Jazeera America.

Groups that complain about “dark money” in politics may need to look into the darkness that shrouds their own pots of money.

A number of groups that advocate against anonymous donations in politics are themselves responsible for putting money into elections that cannot be traced, often hidden under layers of opaque networks.

The Center for Public Integrity found 21 groups, vocal about so-called dark money, that put money into politics but do not fully disclose their donors. The groups either gave to ballot measure campaigns, paid for messages about candidates or gave to political action committees.

“If you’re going to jump into the arena of combating dark money, it’s far better to shed light on your own money,” said Norm Ornstein, a disclosure proponent at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. “You need a pretty powerful rationale for not doing that.”

But many of the groups identified by the Center for Public Integrity said that they already exceed what the law requires by disclosing at least some of their donors. Some relied on an argument that opponents of disclosure raise regularly: Their donors could face hostility or mistreatment if the public knew the donors’ identities.

Dark money groups fighting dark money

In Maine, groups advocating for clean elections helped pass a ballot measure in November that, among other things, will require election advertisements to display their top three funders. The groups emphasized the state’s need for transparency in their appeals to voters.

“When politicians rely on money from wealthy special interests, they end up ignoring our priorities,” one of the groups, Mainers for Accountable Elections, said in TV ads. “We need accountability and transparency to keep politicians honest.”

The group did not say in the TV ads who were the top funders of the messages, as the new law now requires others to do. And the committees advocating for transparency accepted contributions that cannot be fully traced — what some of those activists typically would call “dark money.”

A Massachusetts-based campaign finance reform group called the Piper Fund gave $200,000 to one of the Maine ballot measure committees advocating for the clean elections initiative, according to state records. But who exactly may have supplied that $200,000 to the Piper Fund is somewhat of a mystery.

The group lists a number of funds and foundations as “funding partners” on its website, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Ford Foundation. 

(Both organizations also fund this nonprofit newsroom. Click here to see a list of all donors to the Center for Public Integrity. The Center accepts donations from donor-advised funds. It accepts anonymous donations up to $250 and on a case-by-case basis thereafter under the supervision of the organization’s board Executive Committee. The Center does not engage in political activity.)

But the Piper Fund website also acknowledges it receives money from anonymous givers and “numerous other individual donors.” It does not explain what share of its funding comes from these unnamed donors.

The fund’s director, Melissa Spatz, said the Maine donation came from a “pooled fund.” The group exists to reduce the influence of money in politics and build a fair court system, she said.

A number of other nonprofit funders of the Maine ballot measure also disclose their donors but in a limited manner.

For example, Washington, D.C.-based campaign finance reform group Every Voice gave nearly $230,000, according to state records. Its website lists donors who have given $5,000 or more since 2011 but includes in the list “Anonymous.” Adding a layer of complexity, it also receives funds from other organizations, including the Piper Fund, whose donors can’t be fully traced.

“We go above and beyond what is required of us by law to disclose our donors,” Every Voice spokeswoman Laura Friedenbach said in an email. “We will continue to follow the rules no matter if there are changes in disclosure requirements.”

The president of one of the ballot measure committees for the Maine initiative, Andrew Bossie, emphasized that his group disclosed every donor. But its affiliated educational nonprofit, which gave money to the committee, does not disclose its donors. The result: The source of that money isn't clear to voters. 

While he favors disclosure, Bossie said, it’s not fair for campaign finance reform groups to have to disclose every donor.

“Asking one particular group to play by a different set of rules just because they’re looking to change those rules is a little bit of an unfair expectation,” he said.

And it’s different when groups are giving to ballot measure campaigns, Bossie said, because donors cannot corrupt a ballot measure like they could a candidate.

But giving voters more information about who’s financing a ballot measure is a good enough reason to ask for disclosure, even if the measure can’t be corrupted, said Rick Hasen, a campaign finance regulation expert at University of California, Irvine, School of Law.

Hasen pointed to California’s Proposition 16 in 2010, when voters rejected a plan to make it harder for municipalities to form their own electric utilities. Pacific Gas & Electric, which stood to lose customers if cities started their own utilities, provided nearly all of the campaign’s $46 million in funding.

“Once the public learned about that, the measure was defeated,” he said. “And so disclosure in ballot measure elections provides voters with valuable information.”

Using conservative arguments

The D.C.-based nonprofit Food & Water Watch, which advocates for clean water and safe food products, last year joined more than 60 other organizations in signing a letter asking President Barack Obama to force government contractors to disclose their political spending.

“Hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in our elections by donors who remain anonymous, leaving voters in the dark about the people and interests to whom candidates are beholden,” the letter stated.

But Food & Water Watch has also invested dollars in elections from unknown sources.

The group spent more than $600,000 since 2012 supporting ballot measures that would have required labels on genetically modified foods, according to data from the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

In its 2013 annual report, the most recent available online, Food & Water Watch emphasizes that it does not take money from corporations or governments and lists some foundations that have given to it. However, it thanks “anonymous funders and supporters” and does not list individual donors.

“That’s in order to protect them from blowback from the groups that we’re critiquing,” said Kate Fried, policy communications director for the group.

But protection from blowback is the same argument that many conservatives make against mandates that nonprofits disclose their donors, or that government contractors disclose their political giving to such groups. They often point to the 1958 case NAACP v. Alabama, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state could not force the civil rights group to divulge its donor lists, as its contributors could face threats or persecution.

“It’s obviously hypocritical,” said David Keating, president of the Center for Competitive Politics, a conservative nonprofit that does not disclose its donors and argues against disclosure. “It also proves our point that many donors do value their privacy and won’t give money if they know their information is going to post.”

Differences in disclosure

Nonprofit groups’ disclosure policies vary. Some campaign finance reform groups list donors online; some disclose donors if asked. Some only disclose gifts from institutions; others list institutions and individuals. Some accept anonymous money; some do not. Some do not list gift amounts whatsoever; others list funders by dollar ranges.

Nearly all the groups identified by the Center for Public Integrity that partially disclosed their funding also accepted what appeared to be anonymous money from donor-advised funds. This means the gifts officially came from organizations such as the Tides Foundation or Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program at the recommendation of a donor who remains unknown to the public.

Out of the 21 groups that the Center for Public Integrity found using untraceable money even as they denounced it, 16 disclosed donors in some way. But all of their donor lists had shortcomings: some accepted anonymous money, others did not list amounts given or individual names.

One group, Democracy Initiative, seemed to have no donor disclosure online and did not respond to the Center for Public Integrity’s inquiries about its policies.

Another group, American Family Voices, does not disclose its donors. But last year the Center for Public Integrity showed that the group received big contributions from large unions, environmental interests and a major corporate retail lobbying group. The group did not respond to requests for comment.

The final three organizations — U.S. Public Interest Research Group, People for the American Way and Free Speech for People — said that they do not publicly disclose donors. 

Free Speech for People President John Bonifaz said that his group plans to create a policy this month that would disclose donors but still allow for anonymous gifts. He said it received only two anonymous gifts in the past five years.

U.S. PIRG gave more than $5,000 to the Maine ballot measure and cut five-figure checks to two clean energy ballot measures in 2004 and 2006, according to state records and data from the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

Spokesman Chris MacKenzie said the organization doesn’t list its donors’ names because they give such small amounts: Less than 2 percent of its donations over the past 45 years came in contributions of more than $5,000.

U.S. PIRG does not disclose even its largest donors, MacKenzie said, “because they’re not representative of where we receive the bulk of our funding and because we aren’t required to by law. However, we would welcome laws that increase disclosure requirements for large donors.”

People for the American Way, which does not disclose its donors, has used its funds to pay for ads about candidates, including TV messages about Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012 and U.S. Senate candidates in 2014.

“An environment where one side plays by one set of rules and the other plays by the other set of rules is not a good place to be,” said Marge Baker, an executive at the group, which advocates against anonymous money and supports disclosure legislation. “This shouldn’t be voluntary. This should be mandatory. Everybody should be playing by the same set of rules, and we’re going to fight tooth and nail to do that.”

Baker said even though her group isn’t legally required to disclose its donors, it’s considering adopting a policy to voluntarily disclose some donors because it values transparency.

On the other end of the spectrum is the Sunlight Foundation.

Though it does not spend any money on elections, the group itemizes donations on its website, listing each donor name, amount and the purpose of the gift.

But even Sunlight’s extensive disclosure has limits. For instance, though its policy is not to accept anonymous gifts over $250, in 2015 Sunlight accepted three donations from donor-advised funds at the recommendations of anonymous donors. One of the gifts was $25,000, as disclosed on its website.

“Sunlight has a strong preference for detailed public disclosure of all the sources of our funding online, and we're proud of the way we publish that information,” Communications Director Jenn Topper said in an email. “We review each situation carefully, and disclose the information we can.”

Some pro-transparency groups lack formal policies on whether to disclose their donors. Piper Fund and its parent organization, the Proteus Fund, do not have a written policy on donor disclosure. But that could be changing soon.

“Your email triggered some conversations within Piper that I think were really healthy,” director Spatz told the Center for Public Integrity. “Because of your email, I emailed with my colleagues at the Proteus Fund and we're starting to develop one.”

Spatz expects to have a policy in place in 2016.

This story was co-published with Daily Beast. 

New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo called Wednesday for major changes to the state’s ethics and campaign finance laws, following months of scandal that punctuated deep-seated problems in Albany’s political culture.

The proposals, several of which the governor has pushed previously, were floated as part of Cuomo’s joint State of the State and budget address. They come in the wake of a tumultuous year during which both the Assembly speaker and Senate leader were arrested and then convicted on federal corruption charges. And they arrive on the heels of a D- grade for the Empire State from the State Integrity Investigation, a national ranking of state government accountability and transparency published last year by the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity.

After listing a series of accomplishments and goals for the state, from creating jobs and fighting poverty to tackling climate change, Cuomo said that restoring the public’s trust in government is a “threshold issue” that lawmakers must address.

“We have a big agenda, we want to do big things,” Cuomo said. “We need to restore the trust to do it.”

The speech was made two days after the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, made a rare statement to say his office was ending an inquiry into the Cuomo administration’s potential interference with an investigative panel that the governor had established in 2013 and then abruptly shut down in 2014. Bharara indicated, however, that he is still pursuing other probes into New York officials.

Those statements may help Cuomo push the Legislature to enact some of the changes he’s seeking, which include a cap on the outside income that lawmakers can earn — modeled on a similar program for the U.S. Congress — and a system for public financing of political campaigns. Cuomo also wants to strengthen the state’s oversight of lobbyists and to overhaul New York’s open records laws.

In addition, Cuomo called on lawmakers to close the so-called “LLC loophole,” a campaign finance law quirk that allows limited liability companies to give campaign contributions subject to the limits that apply to individuals, rather than the limits for corporations, which are far lower. Powerful interests, particularly within the real estate industry, have used the loophole to give millions of dollars to political candidates in recent years by registering multiple LLCs. No one has benefited more than Cuomo.

The state’s D- grade from the Center reflected many of the systemic problems that Cuomo’s proposals would address: New York earned an F in the category for public access to information and a D- for political financing. In the days following the report’s publication, a coalition of good-government groups used the grade to call for many of the reforms that Cuomo said he will press for this year, as did a couple of lawmakers.

But there’s a long road ahead, and anyone who follows politics in Albany might feel like they’ve heard this all before. Two years ago, Cuomo announced during his annual budget address that he wanted the legislature to pass significant ethics reforms as part of that year’s budget deal, including a system of public financing and more stringent disclosure of lawmakers’ finances.

A couple of months later, though, a budget deal emerged that included just a shadow of what Cuomo had called for — public financing, for example, was scaled back to a pilot program that went nowhere. Also part of the deal: Cuomo disbanded that investigative panel he had appointed the previous year to look into the capital’s culture of corruption.

Many of the governor’s critics cried foul, and a New York Times investigation found that Cuomo’s staff had been deeply involved with the supposedly independent panel’s work, particularly when it began investigating some of the governor’s political supporters (it was amid these allegations that Bharara, the U.S. attorney, began looking into Cuomo’s involvement with the panel). The intrigue made any progress on cleaning Albany’s image seem incremental, at best.

Then in January of last year, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver was arrested by federal authorities and charged with multiple corruption counts. Chatter about ethics ramped up, and in the spring, Cuomo and the legislature again attached a reform deal to the budget, only to fall short once more in the eyes of the state’s watchdog groups. This time, Cuomo did win greater disclosure of lawmaker’s finances, but only with significant loopholes that will continue to allow officials who moonlight as lawyers or consultants to hide the names of their clients. Major campaign finance changes, which Cuomo had been promising for years, remained on the wish list.

By the end of the year, however, Silver had been convicted, as had Dean Skelos, the former Senate leader, who was indicted in an unrelated corruption scheme just months after Silver. The events made it even harder to ignore the capital’s ethical problems.

Some of the details of Cuomo’s new initiatives remain unclear, said Blair Horner, executive director of NYPIRG, an advocacy group that has pressed for stronger ethics and campaign finance laws. “These all seem like good ideas,” he said, “but how you do it matters.”

Also unclear is how much support the governor will find in the Legislature. Last week, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a Democrat, said that ethics reform would be among his top priorities, calling in particular for closing the LLC loophole and for a law to prevent lawmakers convicted of corruption from collecting their pensions, a change that’s included in the governor’s proposals.

In the Senate, a group of independent Democrats in December “relaunched” a campaign to ban corporate contributions and prohibit outside income. But Republican John Flanagan, the Senate majority leader, has said he would not support public financing of elections or a ban on outside income.

Neither Flanagan nor Heastie immediately responded to requests for comment for this article.

New York’s budget process — which earned an F in the Center’s report — gives the governor strong leverage over the legislature, Horner said, so the key will be whether Cuomo makes these reforms a priority.

“I think it really hinges on what the governor does after he introduces this,” he said, and “how hard he pushes.”

A new super PAC promoting Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential candidacy on Wednesday launched a multi-million dollar ad blitz — the first major TV push by outside groups supporting the ascendant Republican.

“We are at war,” a narrator says in the ad’s opening frames. “Not just abroad, but here at home.”

The ad later cuts to a photo of fellow Republican candidate and Sen. Marco Rubio, who’s standing behind a lectern.

“But Washington continues to fail us with groups like the Gang of Eight,” says the woman in the ad’s voiceover, referring to a bipartisan group of senators that in 2013 drafted an immigration reform bill.

Cruz, in contrast, is a “proven conservative,” the ad asserts.

Stand for Truth is the name of the newly-formed group behind the ad flurry.

But the group has yet to reveal many truths about itself: It hasn’t volunteered information about its donors or how much money they’ve contributed to the group. Federal law doesn’t mandate that Stand for Truth do so until Jan. 31, the day before the Iowa caucuses.

When it comes to TV advertising, Stand for Truth has already eclipsed a gaggle of other groups complementing Cruz’s official campaign committee.

Consider that three sister super PACs — Keep the Promise I, Keep the Promise II and Keep the Promise III — have cumulatively aired fewer than 100 TV ads so far this election despite forming last spring and raising tens of millions of dollars, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of data from ad tracking firm Kantar Media/CMAG.

The ad’s sponsor

Stand for Truth registered as a super PAC in November — about eight months after Cruz declared his candidacy.

As of today, Stand for Truth has no website. It lacks a social media presence. Its only publicly named associate is Eric Lycan, the group’s legal counsel.

In announcing the ad buy earlier this month, Lycan told Politico "Sen. Cruz is under attack from all directions and will be for the remainder of this election. Stand for Truth is here to make sure an accurate message reaches voters.”

Lycan did not respond to requests for comment.

Who’s behind it?

Lycan served as legal counsel for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s 2014 re-election effort — perhaps surprising considering Cruz’s continual quarrelling with the Kentucky Republican.

Investor Hal Lambert of Texas is also a major backer of Stand for Truth, according to The Washington Post. Lambert, who has raised money for Cruz in the past, was previously the Texas Republican Party's finance chair.

Lambert, who did not respond to requests for comment, has already maxed out his contributions to the official Cruz campaign, though he won’t run into this problem in donating to Stand for Truth. Like any super PAC, Stand for Truth has no limits on how much it may raise or spend, as long as the group does not directly coordinate its spending with the candidate.

Republican ad firm SRCP Media is spearheading Stand for Truth's media buys. The firm has previously bought ads for the campaigns of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., as well as outside groups such as the American Future Fund and Americans for a Balanced Budget.

Money in

As it stands, Stand for Truth’s donors and cash totals remain opaque — to be revealed by Jan. 31 when the group files its first fundraising report with the Federal Election Commission.

But given its massive pro-Cruz ad buy and the money needed to fuel such an effort, the super PAC is poised to become a significant player in an election where non-candidate groups are dominating the airwaves.

Money out

The pro-Cruz super PAC spent $4 million on ads in Iowa and South Carolina media markets, according to a Stand for Truth statement. The ads began airing Wednesday in Iowa and are slated to run through the end of the South Carolina primary on Feb. 20.

The ad blitz coincides with numerous other ad volleys in Iowa by candidates and outside groups alike. So far in January, Iowa TV markets played home to 55 percent of the presidential campaign ads aired nationwide, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of data from media tracking firm Kantar Media/CMAG.

Kantar Media/CMAG monitors television ads that run on local broadcast TV in all 211 media markets, as well as national network and national cable TV. It does not monitor local cable stations or track digital advertising.

Stand for Truth has also spent an additional $200,000 on radio time, digital ads and yard signs in a bid to promote Cruz’s campaign, according to federal records.

Why watch this group

Stand for Truth moves from the periphery amid reported conflict between Cruz’s campaign and his three main supportive super PACs: Keep the Promise I, Keep the Promise II and Keep the Promise III. Cruz is said to be frustrated that the groups are hoarding their flushed cash reserves.

As a result, nearly 90 percent of all pro-Cruz TV ads have come from the Cruz campaign itself.

This stands in stark contrast to fellow Republican candidate Jeb Bush, whose campaign has only sponsored 5 percent of all pro-Bush TV ads, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of Kantar Media/CMAG data. Bush’s TV messaging is instead being outsourced to super PAC Right to Rise USA.

The emergence of Stand for Truth could mean super PACs will become responsible for more pro-Cruz ads.

Veteran political reporter Michael J. Mishak is joining the Center for Public Integrity’s state politics team to cover the influence of special interests on state government.

Mishak joins the Center for Public Integrity from National Journal, where he wrote about the 2016 presidential campaign. He was also previously a national political writer for the Associated Press in Miami, winning awards for his stories about former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio. Mishak also covered California government for the Los Angeles Times and politics and labor for the Las Vegas Sun, breaking stories in 2007 and 2008 about the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

"Reporting on state government is a vital and growing part of the Center for Public Integrity's portfolio of investigative journalism. Michael brings a proven record of achievement in this area,” said Peter Bale, CEO.

This year the Who’s Calling the Shots in the States? project will examine lobbying in the states, with a comprehensive data-driven look at who is trying to influence state policies and to what ends. The project is part of a three-year, $2.88 million grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, one of the largest single grants in the Center’s history.

Since the awarding of the grant, the states team has examined  lawmakers in South Carolina who paid themselves and their own companies nearly $100 million since 2009, detailed who was behind Ohio’s ballot measure to legalize marijuana and profiled Manoj Bhargava, the founder of 5-hour  Energy, dubbing him the “political kingmaker nobody knows.”

Michael tweets at @mjmishak.

U.S. efforts to keep nuclear explosive materials out of the hands of terrorists are losing steam and will be undermined without a concerted new diplomatic push, an independent nonprofit group in Washington, D.C., warned on Jan. 14.

The chill in U.S.-Russian relations and a range of problems elsewhere — bureaucratic inertia, inadequate funding, public distraction, and a weak grasp of the peril in some nations — have combined to slow international progress towards locking down all the building blocks of a potential terrorist bomb, the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), a nonprofit organization, said in a new report.

“We are in a race between cooperation and catastrophe, and the world’s leaders must run faster,” said former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), who helped found NTI and played a leading role in organizing U.S. assistance for nuclear security efforts in Russia after the Cold War, In an introduction to the report.

Nunn, speaking at a cavernous Washington building where the Obama administration is scheduled to convene its fourth and final international summit to promote nuclear security measures in late March, sounded an unusually dour note as he surveyed the status of those efforts.

He said nations with lower nuclear profiles look to Russia and the United States for cues, and both nations are now updating their nuclear arsenals while curtailing their diplomatic contacts. At the same time, “brutal attacks and incidents by ISIL, al Qaeda, Boko Haram and other organizations are on the rise, raising the specter of catastrophic nuclear terrorism if they or other terrorists get control of dangerous nuclear material,” Nunn said. “And of course, that’s what the world must prevent.”

Reports like The Center for Public Integrity’s article in November that disclosed worries about exposing a missing trove of Soviet-era highly enriched uranium (a nuclear bomb fuel) “should provide all the impetus needed to act swiftly,” Nunn said.

NTI’s new study is the third such analysis by the group since 2011, and it again ranked key nations based on detailed assessments of their safeguards for keeping nuclear explosive materials — plutonium and highly-enriched uranium — out of the wrong hands. Among the 24 nations with enough material for bomb, Australia again got the top mark, while North Korea came in last.

India’s overall rank was 21^st in that group, and South Africa was 16^th. Worrisome activities by both countries were detailed in articles published this year by the Center. Japan, which was separately profiled by the Center last year, improved its ranking somewhat (to 12^th place) by publishing nuclear security laws and regulations and hosting a review of its precautions by experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency, a UN group. Seven of the 24 nations have never had such a peer review, the report noted.

But the report also expressed concern that Japan — like India, Pakistan, the Netherlands, North Korea, and the United Kingdom — is increasing its stocks of “weapons-usable” nuclear materials, a circumstance that only adds to the burdens of locking them safely away.

The report further noted that more than 80 percent of all nuclear explosive materials are held by militaries, whose practices and safeguards are not covered by international agreements on the security of such materials. It urged all the nuclear weapons-states to agree on a set of security precautions they would each implement.

For the first time, the report also included a detailed and alarming analysis of the susceptibility of nuclear sites around the globe — including reactors, storage facilities, and factories — to cyberattack and sabotage.

Among 47 nations with the most nuclear materials or power plants, the report said, twenty don’t require even the most basic cybersecurity measures, it said. Terrorists, it warned, could exploit computer vulnerabilities either to overcome security precautions and gain direct access to nuclear materials, or they could deliberately disable a reactor’s cooling systems, provoking a disaster on par with the Fukushima plant meltdown in March 2011.

Nations with new or developing nuclear energy programs, such as Chile, Egypt and Indonesia, are particularly susceptible to sabotage because their legal and regulatory structures are immature, undermining oversight and enforcement of sound safeguards.

The NTI gave the United States a fairly high rating for cybersecurity — a 6^th place ranking — but internal government audits have been more critical. The Energy Department’s inspector general, for example, reported in a November audit that officials had failed to properly report about contractors’ computer systems, impeding oversight.

A separate audit in June 2015 faulted the nuclear weapons laboratories for weak cybersecurity practices, including a failure to test systems for vulnerabilities and to protect against insider threats by ordering frequent password changes.

An audit released this week by Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s inspector general of cybersecurity at its Secure Operations Center, which contains sensitive details about nuclear power plants and generators in the U.S., showed attempts to gain unauthorized access or to insert malicious computer code had increased by 18 percent from fiscal years 2013 to 2014. Over the same period, cyberattacks throughout the U.S. government grew by 9.7 percent.

North Korea’s ranking at the bottom of the cybersecurity list as well as the nuclear security list was not surprising, according to Leo Abruzzese, director of global forecasting at public policy at the Economist Intelligence Unit, an offshoot of The Economist magazine that gathered and analyzed data for the report. North Korea is averse to the type of international cooperation and transparency that provides security assurances that the index rating system rewards, he noted, calling the country “dead last by a wide margin.”

Samantha Pitts-Kiefer, senior program officer for scientific and technical affairs at NTI, said the three summit meetings convened by the Obama administration so far have been helpful. A dozen nations have eliminated all nuclear explosives from their territories since the first summit, although only one acted in the past two years.

She and her colleagues said they worry that global leaders will be less attentive to the risks after the final summit this year.

“The results of this report should sound a warning not only that the work of securing all weapons-usable nuclear materials is unfinished,” the report said, “but also that attention and commitment to preventing a terrorist from building and using a nuclear weapon must intensify.”

The nation’s three major auto-title lenders are pressing Virginia officials to keep a wide range of their business records secret, including details about how often they get in trouble with regulators and how many cars they repossess from buyers who can’t repay their loans.

The bid for secrecy is clear from heavily redacted annual reports the lenders filed with Virginia officials on Thursday. The redacted reports were submitted to the state as part of a public records dispute between the Center for Public Integrity and the firms TitleMax of Virginia Inc.; Anderson Financial Services LLC, doing business as LoanMax; and Fast Auto Loans Inc.

Title loans are controversial because of punishing interest rates they can impose on borrowers. During 2014, the average title loan in Virginia was for $1,048 and took nearly a year to repay at 222 percent annual interest, according to data the state aggregates from all title lenders.

The public records dispute arose in November when the Center requested copies of the 2014 annual reports, which include more detailed and individual data on their operations, the title lenders filed with the Virginia Bureau of Financial Institutions.

The annual reports include sales and income figures, the volume of loans made and their terms, as well as sensitive information such as how often the lenders repossess cars when buyers fail to pay them. The firms also must disclose if they’ve been investigated or cited by regulators in other states or at the federal level. The annual reports don’t contain the names of any borrowers or their financial condition.

Virginia officials said nobody had asked for the annual reports before the Center made its request, and they could find no legal basis to not release them. But state officials gave the title loan companies a chance to submit redacted copies of their annual reports and cite a legal basis for withholding any portion of the reports.

In its report filed Thursday, Fast Auto Loans disclosed that it operates 69 stores in Virginia, but little else. The firm blacked out details such as the number of loans it makes and the interest rates it charges, the default rate and the number of cars it repossesses. That’s “proprietary and financial information” and making it public would be “detrimental” to the business, Fast Auto wrote.

Fast Auto answered “yes” to a question in the report form that asks if the company or its officers had been “the subject of any regulatory investigation” by any state or federal agency in the past three years.  But it concealed details, arguing, “Such information is protected from disclosure as confidential due to the pending nature of the investigations.”

While Fast Auto revealed the names of some top executives, including president and CEO Robert I. Reich, it scrubbed out ownership details.

TitleMax of Virginia also disclosed little beyond the name of CEO Tracy Young and that it operates 96 stores in the commonwealth. The company argued that it wanted to protect “trade secrets” from its competitors.

“This would permit competitors to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the TitleMax’s products and their financial risks, which would cause substantial competitive harm to TitleMax,” the report states.

Anderson Financial/dba LoanMax didn’t name the company’s officers, though it listed its headquarters address in Alpharetta, Georgia, and noted it had 73 stores in Virginia.

LoanMax noted that it had reported regulatory actions to the commission “under the assumption that the annual report would not be publicly disclosed.”

“Disclosing the information in question to the public could create a disincentive for motor vehicle title lenders to disclose information to the commission,” according to the report.

The commission will hold a hearing and take testimony on the dispute Jan. 22 in Richmond.

Whether the records are public is not entirely clear because the State Corporation Commission operates outside the Virginia open records laws.

That should change, said Megan Rhyne, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government.

Rhyne said the commission “regulates so many of the businesses that have direct impact on the public, yet there is far less ability to view the regulatory records … than the records of any other government agency or department.”

Some Virginia lawmakers are taking aim at the high interest rates charged by title lenders. This week, Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, voiced his support for a bill to cap rates at 36 percent a year. That’s the ceiling for loans made to military personnel.

Yet efforts to limit interest charges have failed repeatedly in many states, including Virginia. A Center for Public Integrity investigation in December found that about 150 bills to reel in interest rates or curb abusive lending tactics died in 20 state legislatures over the past five years. Lenders often won the day by arguing rate caps would force them to shut their doors.

Executives with the title loan companies could not be reached for or declined to comment about the Center’s findings.

Critics accuse big title lenders of lining up support in statehouses with hefty political contributions, including more than half a million dollars in Virginia over the past decade.

In 2015, bills in the Virginia General Assembly to cap interest rates, restrict the number of loan stores in some jurisdictions and keep the stores at least 10 miles away from military bases all failed to pass.

On Tuesday, a pro-Hillary Clintonsuper PAC sent campaign regulators a seemingly perfunctory letter, all of 30 words long.

“This letter serves to officially notify the Federal Election Commission that Priorities USA Action will file its reports on a monthly basis to the Commission as of January 1, 2016,” it read.

Sounds harmless enough. But that little note — and more just like it from other super PACs — allows top presidential bankrollers to remain hidden as the campaign grows white hot.

That’s because, thanks to a quirk in federal law, such letters give those super PACs the power to withhold their January donors’ names until well after the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries are conducted next month.

Also secret: the potentially massive amounts of money the donors are contributing in order to affect the outcome of those crucial contests.

Instead, the super PACs will file campaign finance disclosure reports that only include contributions they’ve received through December.

Beyond Priorities USA Action, 10 other presidential super PACs have so far taken advantage of this opportunity to withhold information about their January donors, a Center for Public Integrity review of federal records indicates.

They include:

• Right to Rise USA (supporting former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush)
• Concerned American Voters (supporting U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky)
• Pursuing America’s Greatness (supporting former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee)
• America Leads (supporting New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie)
• Conservative Solutions PAC (supporting U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida)
• CARLY for America (supporting businesswoman Carly Fiorina)
• Four super PACs with variationsonthename“Keep the Promise” (supporting U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas)

“The situation is really inappropriate — the whole point of disclosure is to provide information to voters when they need it,” said Ann Ravel, a Democratic member of the Federal Election Commission who served as the agency’s chairwoman last year.

Ravel, however, acknowledged there’s little the FEC can do about it at this juncture, and current FEC Chairman Matthew Petersen concurred.

Lee Goodman, a Republican FEC commissioner, noted that political action committees commonly change their filing status during election years to put themselves on a predictable, monthly schedule. Otherwise, they’d be forced to file campaign finance disclosures before every primary contest in which they participated — an onerous prospect.

“I don’t think they’re doing this for subterfuge, and I’ve never heard of a voter who based his or her vote on the identity of a donor to a super PAC,” Goodman said. “But this does, perhaps, leave a gap in disclosure, which is important and certainly something the commission could look at.”

Here’s how the super PAC filing loophole works:

Most major super PACs filed just one campaign finance disclosure report during 2015, as the law allows them to do.

But this month, these “semi-annual” super PAC filers who’ve spent money in the New Hampshire primary campaign race face a choice.

They may choose to do nothing, maintain their current status and be required to submit a “pre-primary” report on Jan. 28 — 12 days before New Hampshire’s Feb. 9 primary.

Such a pre-primary report would reveal everyone who’s given a super PAC money — and how much — through Jan. 20.  (Because of a 36-year-old FEC ruling, presidential caucus contests such as the one Iowa conducts on Feb. 1 don’t trigger such reports.)

Or, as many super PACs already have, they may this month notify the FEC that they’re switching to a monthly filing schedule.

Doing so exempts a super PAC from filing Jan. 28 pre-primary reports, and therefore, revealing their income from Jan. 1 through Jan. 20.

Instead, they’ll file a report disclosing their 2015 fundraising on Jan. 31 and another report detailing their January fundraising on Feb. 20, per FEC rules.

Some presidential race-focused super PACs pulled a similar donor-hiding switcheroo ahead of the 2012 election, although this time around, super PACs are raising exponentially more money to promote their candidates of choice — or lambaste those they oppose.

Technically, the FEC could deny such filing change requests. But the agency almost never does.

Pro-Clinton Priorities USA Action spokesman Justin Barasky declined to comment on the super PAC’s switch, as did pro-Bush Right to Rise USA spokesman Paul Lindsay.

None of the other presidential super PACs who’ve switched their filing status responded to requests for comment from the Center for Public Integrity.

One person who’s steamed about the situation is Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who’s emerged as Clinton’s strong primary rival while disavowing all super PACs.

“I’m shocked,” Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs said when told of the pro-Clinton Priorities USA Action filing switch. “You’ve got to ask the question, ‘What are they afraid of?’”

The Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens Untied v. Federal Election Commission helped lead to the initial creation of super PACs later that year.

Super PACs — initially exotic political vehicles that sprung into existence following Citizens United — have this election cycle evolved to become conventional weapons of most presidential efforts.

Unlike traditional PACs, which may only raise money in limited increments, super PACs may raise and spent unlimited amounts of money to advocate for or against political candidates — so long as they don’t directly coordinate messaging with a candidate’s campaign.

Together, super PACs have raised hundreds of millions of dollars to support White House hopefuls, and before Election Day in November, they’ll assuredly raise hundreds of millions of dollars more.

Dozens of individuals had already given super PACs at least $1 million by June 30, when such groups were last require to report their income.

University of New Hampshire political science professor Dante Scala says he doubts the revelation of some 11th-hour super PAC donor would sway most New Hampshire primary voters’ votes.

But there’s always a chance of something surprising occurring — perhaps a major Democratic donor funding blanket attack ads on a Republican, or billionaires Charles and David Koch suddenly pumping cash into some effort after month remaining neutral.

“You’d like them to err on the side of transparency,” Scala said.

By now, you've probably heard the phrase "dark money."

Activists use it. Politicians use it. And journalists use it, including here at the Center for Public Integrity.

For some people, it's just another piece of confusing campaign finance jargon. For others, it's a term of art, with a precise definition.

So here are answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about dark money in politics.

What makes political money dark money?

The sources behind most of the money raised by politicians and political groups are publicly disclosed. Candidates, parties and political action committees — including the super PACs that are allowed to accept unlimited amounts of money — all report the names of their donors to the Federal Election Commission on a regular basis. Or, to be technical, they regularly disclose the names of all their donors who each give more than $200. But when the source of political money isn't known, that's dark money.

What does political dark money look like?

The two most common vehicles for dark money in politics are politically active nonprofits and corporate entities such as limited liability companies. Certain politically active nonprofits — notably those formed under sections 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) of the tax code — are generally not required to publicly disclose their donors. Meanwhile, when limited liability companies are formed in certain states, such as Delaware and Wyoming, they are essentially black boxes; the company’s name is basically the only thing known about them. These LLCs can be used to make political expenditures themselves or to donate to super PACs.

How much money are we talking about?

During the 2012 election cycle — the last time the presidency was at stake — dark money groups pumped about $300 million into political messages that called for the election or defeat of federal candidates, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Additionally, dark money groups spent hundreds of millions of dollars on political advertisements that focused more on issues than candidates. The most notable example? Americans for Prosperity, the flagship nonprofit of the conservative billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. Also worth noting: Dark money doesn’t affect every election. It frequently targets the most high-profile political races.

Do Democrats use dark money?

Yes. Neither party wants to be left behind in the political money arms race. The result: Dark money groups are multiplying— and thriving— on both ends of the political spectrum. However, during the 2012 election cycle, conservative dark money groups that reported expenditures to the FEC outspent liberal ones by about 8-to-1, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

How does dark money relate to the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling?

The Citizens United decision gave the green light to corporations, including certain types of nonprofit corporations, to spend money on political ads that expressly called for the election or defeat of federal candidates. A prior U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2007, known as Wisconsin Right to Life v. FEC, had allowed corporations, including certain types of nonprofits, to spend money on issue ads during the run-up to elections — so long as they did not overtly call for the election or defeat of candidates. The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 had banned both types of corporate spending in politics. Now that these restrictions have been overturned, politically active nonprofit groups are spending more money than ever to directly influence elections.

Are there other types of money in politics that come from unknown sources?

The names of small-dollar donors who give $200 or less are not publicly disclosed. Some conservative activists and politicians have worried that foreigners, or other illicit donors, might try to exploit this disclosure rule to their advantage. But most election observers can’t point to any evidence of widespread abuse.

Why are so many people upset about dark money in politics?

Campaign finance reform activists argue that voters should know who is funding political advertisements. Such information, they assert, is essential to voters’ ability to evaluate the merits of political messages — and to know if certain special interests may be trying to curry favor with politicians. Fred Wertheimer, the founder and president of Democracy 21, for one, has said that “history makes clear that unlimited contributions and secret money are a formula for corruption.” Likewise, the Campaign Legal Center has called the emergence of dark money a “serious threat to our democracy.” In a portion of the controversial Citizens United decision, eight of the nine Supreme Court justices agreed that disclosure of money in politics was important because “transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages.”

Who thinks dark money in politics is good?

Supporters of anonymity in politics frequently note that The Federalist Papers and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense were published anonymously during the country’s founding. Lawyers at the Wyoming Liberty Group, for instance, have argued that throughout American history, “anonymous political speech has been the scorn of entrenched powers and the saving balm of emerging voices.” Meanwhile, officials at the Center for Competitive Politics have argued that dark money is a “pejorative term” and that its threat is “overblown.” The Center for Competitive Politics has further argued that “disclosure comes with a cost,” including the potential to chill speech and for donors to be harassed.

Who regulates political dark money?

The nation’s primary regulator of money in politics is the six-member FEC. However, the FEC’s three Republican commissioners and three Democratic ones have significant ideological disagreements about the degree to which dark money is a problem. Meanwhile, the Internal Revenue Service regulates nonprofit organizations and can revoke a nonprofit’s tax-exempt status if a group is deemed to not deserve it. But in recent years, only a handful of 501(c)(4) nonprofits — which have the primary purpose of promoting “social welfare” — have had their tax-exempt status revoked because the Internal Revenue Service deemed them to be too political. The Department of Justice can also criminally prosecute “knowing and willful” violations of campaign finance law, although this, too, is rare.

So, is there really no way to know who's behind political dark money?

Over the years, journalists have developed a number of backdoor approaches to follow the money flowing to dark money organizations. But oftentimes, these approaches only yield results long after a dark money spending spree is over.

What are these backdoors?

Sometimes dark money groups receive money from other political groups that must disclose their expenditures to either state or federal campaign finance regulators. Other times, dark money groups receive substantial amounts of money from other nonprofits that must report doling out these grants on their own annual tax filings with the IRS. Similarly, some dark money groups receive money from labor unions, which must report those expenditures on annual reports filed with the Department of Labor. And on rare occasions, corporations voluntarily disclose their contributions to politically active nonprofits. If an individual donates to a dark money group, there is essentially no public paper trail to follow.

First elected to Congress in 1994 as part of Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolution, Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina now proudly marches to his own beat.

To wit: The staunch Christian conservative frequently works with Democrats on the topic of campaign finance reform — something few other GOP lawmakers do.

Jones is currently the sole Republican co-sponsor of legislation introduced by Rep. Rick Nolan, D-Minn., that seeks to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, handed down six years ago today. The decision gave corporations, including labor unions and “social welfare” nonprofit groups, the green light to spend without limit on political advertisements that call for the election or defeat of federal candidates.

Jones is also the lone Republican co-sponsor of legislation introduced by Rep. John Sarbanes, D-Md., that would establish a public financing system for elections that incentivizes donations from small-dollar givers.

The Center for Public Integrity recently spoke with Jones on Capitol Hill to discuss his support for these campaign finance reforms at a time when so many others in his party are moving in the opposite direction and embracing big-money political groups— even calling for the abolition of campaign contribution limits.

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Center for Public Integrity: One of the leading presidential candidates right now is Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. And one of his campaign finance bills calls for the elimination of campaign contribution limits. What do you think of that?

Walter Jones: I think Citizens United has already done enough in that area. I don’t think that is the way to go. You’ve got to have some type of reasonable limits to all this. Even PACs don’t feel like they have any influence anymore because the super PACs have taken it.

Center for Public Integrity: How would your day-to-day life be different if you weren't as worried about raising money all the time?

Jones: My consultant would tell you that I’m the worst fundraiser up here. I despise it. I always try to get the majority of my money from the people I represent. I will always have a high number of people from my district or the state of North Carolina who have contributed.

Center for Public Integrity: Why do you focus on that?

Jones: I don’t want to be controlled. I feel like my obligation is to the people back home. Ever since I came out against the Iraq War in 2006 and got criticized badly back in the district about that, I decided that the best thing I can do for the people is to be independent — to vote my conscience.

Center for Public Integrity: What do you hope the next steps for campaign finance reform in Congress will be?

Jones: This place has not done anything since McCain-Feingold in the area of campaign finance reform. We’ve done nothing. Policy is controlled by special interests. Policy should be controlled by the people.

Center for Public Integrity: And how do special interests set the agenda?

Jones: The perception is that the system is controlled by special interests because members in both parties make phone calls and have fundraisers.

Center for Public Integrity: Does that perception ring true to you?

Jones: The policy too many times benefits the few instead of the many. That’s just what I see happening up here too often.

Center for Public Integrity: Can you give an example?

Jones: We had a bill on the floor [last spring] that would have allowed mobile home companies to raise their interest rates. Warren Buffett— he owns [one of the largest] mobile home companies in America. I didn’t vote for the bill.

(Editor’s note: The Center for Public Integrity, in collaboration with The Seattle Times, last year investigated Buffett’s mobile home empire and detailed the way it preys on the poor. Buffett has defended the company’s lending practices.)

Center for Public Integrity: When people talk about the need for campaign contribution limits, they usually talk about a concern of corruption. Can you say more about that?

Jones: In the Republican Party — and this is in the book Extortion— when you become a chairman, you do two things. You’re given a limit to raise money for the RNC [Republican National Committee]. And you are also told on certain votes, you have to vote with leadership. Where are the people? Did you come up here to be a chairman and forget the people you represent? Or do you want to represent your people? That’s where this place is conflicted with money.

Center for Public Integrity: If you could wave a magic wand, what would you do?

Jones: First, I would repeal Citizens United. And second, I would offer an alternative in the form of voluntarily public financing.

Center for Public Integrity: Why are those reforms important?

Jones: Everything has gotten out of hand up here. It’s all about raising money. To me, if you are going to give the government back to the people, then you’ve got to clean your own house up.

Another TV commercial flashes across your television.

Instantly, you recognize it as a presidential attack ad: ominous music, unflattering photographs and, in all likelihood, a sponsor with some gobbledygook name — Right to Rise USA, Priorities USA Action, New Day for America, Keep the Promise.

As candidates claw their way through presidential primary season, the Center for Public Integrity is tracking and mapping who is on the air, and where, through a new app.

Advertising activities of political action committees, super PACs, parties, nonprofit groups and, of course, the candidates will be displayed, along with many of the TV ads themselves.

The app — which uses data from ad tracking firm Kantar Media/CMAG, video from the Internet Archive and reporting from Center for Public Integrity journalists — will be updated each Tuesday.

Some ads will be subject to Center for Public Integrity "Source Check" reviews, which aim to reveal the money and people behind tough-to-track political ads.

These "Source Check" articles will be easily accessible through the new app.

The app is the latest component of "Buying of the President 2016," the Center for Public Integrity's reporting project investigating the candidates and political groups responsible for making this presidential election the most expensive in history.

Send tips and insight into presidential campaign ads to tips@publicintegrity.org.