Skip to main content
finance

The Ellis Network — Follow the Money

$1.7M in political spending mapped across 339 recipients.

Purpose

This investigation combines three data sources — TEC bulk CSV filings (2000-2026), TEC expenditure records, and all 24 Harris County campaign finance reports (4,226 pages OCR-extracted) — to build the most complete public map of Ellis's financial network ever assembled. Every dollar is real, every record is public.

Why It Matters

Transparency without accessibility is meaningless. Ellis's financial relationships were buried across thousands of scanned pages and a 960MB state database. This tool extracts, connects, and makes them searchable — so citizens can decide what it means.

Explore the Data

The Ellis Network — Follow the Money Open in new tab

Methodology

TEC personal contributions filtered by contributor name. TEC campaign expenditures filtered by Filer ID. Harris County scanned PDFs OCR-extracted via Tesseract, campaign-related expenditures manually verified. Organization names consolidated across 40+ variant mappings. 730 transactions, 339 unique recipients, $1,746,550 total.

View Full Methodology

Citation

Local Insights Civic Data Lab. The Ellis Network. https://localinsights.ai/products/ellis-finance-network