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Commissioners Court votes on vendor contracts nearly every other Tuesday. When the same donors fund commissioner campaigns and hold county contracts, the public should be able to see the overlap in one picture.
Read this in the original
This entry provides context and source notes. Its detailed explanation remains in the original build; a separate visual breakdown has not yet been authored here.
- Start with the question and coverage below.
- Open the original to inspect the records, controls and evidence behind the finding.
- Check the source dates and methodology before comparing figures or drawing a conclusion.
What you’re looking at
An arc-diagram investigation of the July 2026 Harris County campaign-finance filings. Thirty county campaigns, 1,993 donors — and a dense web of repeat donors concentrated on Commissioners Court, the body that awards county contracts. Includes the vendor crossover: an engineering firm paid $18.6M by the county whose PAC funded four county campaigns.
The question behind it
Built from Harris County Clerk campaign-finance filings and the county's own vendor-payment ledger to show which donors connect the courthouse — and which appear on both sides of the county's books.
Why it matters
Commissioners Court votes on vendor contracts nearly every other Tuesday. When the same donors fund commissioner campaigns and hold county contracts, the public should be able to see the overlap in one picture.
Open the full visualizationSources & method
- Harris County Clerk campaign-finance reports (July 2026 semiannual filings, parsed from PDFs)
- Harris County vendor-payment records, 2023–2026
Method
Contributions received Jan 1 – Jun 30, 2026, parsed from Harris County Clerk filing PDFs; donors grouped by reported name (shared-donor counts are a floor). Vendor payments de-duplicated by payment number. Three campaigns' offices not machine-readable on filings were added from public record and are flagged in the piece.