# Dark Money Map

> Dark Money Map makes public government records easier to find and understand, starting with campaign money, lobbying and legislation in California. It is a nonpartisan public-interest research project: an interactive map that connects campaign committees, their givers, candidates, ballot measures, lobbying firms, organizations and the bills they take positions on, every connection kept with a link to the public filing it came from.

The map draws on the California Secretary of State's CAL-ACCESS campaign and lobbying filings, California Legislative Information, and the state voter guide. It shows reported receipts, itemized givers, late contributions, independent spending, lobbying payments and filed positions on bills. Every dollar on the map runs from a drawn source, or the record says why it cannot: money a committee's report does not itemize by giver, a major donor giving from its own funds, or a committee with no statement. Figures are reported totals from filings, not live balances, and a connection is a disclosed record, never a claim of influence. The site publishes its data files, its method, its known limitations and a set of "patterns to check", leads that known ways of hiding a source would leave in the filings, each with its ordinary explanations.

## The map

- [The map](https://darkmoneymap.org/network): every record and connection, with search, views, a filter and a date window.
- [How to read a connection](https://darkmoneymap.org/articles/how-to-read-a-connection): what each kind of line means.
- [Method](https://darkmoneymap.org/docs/method): sources, how amounts are counted, coverage and limits, corrections.

## Documentation

- [Docs home](https://darkmoneymap.org/docs): the reference for records, connections and files.
- [Record types](https://darkmoneymap.org/docs/records) and [Connection types](https://darkmoneymap.org/docs/connections).
- [How totals are counted](https://darkmoneymap.org/docs/how-totals-are-counted): why givers are never added to receipts.
- [Patterns to check](https://darkmoneymap.org/docs/patterns): the shapes known dark-money techniques leave, and their ordinary explanations.
- [Known limitations](https://darkmoneymap.org/docs/limitations) and [Why figures differ from CAL-ACCESS](https://darkmoneymap.org/docs/why-figures-differ).
- [Data files](https://darkmoneymap.org/docs/data-files): the published datasets and their fields.
- [How to cite](https://darkmoneymap.org/docs/cite) and [Corrections](https://darkmoneymap.org/docs/corrections).

## Articles

- [Articles](https://darkmoneymap.org/articles): reporting from the records, each figure linked to its filing.
- [RSS feed](https://darkmoneymap.org/feed.xml)

## Data

- [Sources](https://darkmoneymap.org/sources): the public systems the records come from.
- [Current data release](https://darkmoneymap.org/docs/data-release): the snapshot date and counts.
- [AI discovery files](https://darkmoneymap.org/ai/summary.json): summary, FAQ and service descriptions in JSON.

## Optional

- [Full text for language models](https://darkmoneymap.org/llms-full.txt): the documentation in one plain-text file, also as [Markdown](https://darkmoneymap.org/llms-full.md).
- [Privacy](https://darkmoneymap.org/privacy), [Contact](https://darkmoneymap.org/contact), [About](https://darkmoneymap.org/about), [Changelog](https://darkmoneymap.org/changelog).