St. Louis businessman has spent millions on Missouri campaigns

Joe Yerardi, of the Columbia (Mo.) Missourian, found that retired St. Louis businessman Rex Sinquefield has spent millions to bankroll numerous campaigns in Missouri in the past two years. "The donations, which total more than $13.3 million, are the result of Sinquefield's personal wealth, his ideological passions and Missouri's lax campaign finance laws, experts and politicians say." His donations have been bipartisan, though favoring Republican campaign committees nearly 3-to-1.

An investigation by The Dallas Morning News found that Governor Rick Perry has given more than $16 million from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund to companies with investors or officers who are large campaign donors.  The governor has denied any sort of political influence on how the tech funds are awarded.

California Watch launched Politics Verbatim, a site that "collects and categorizes the promises, proposals, arguments and attacks" made by Democrat Jerry Brown and Republican Meg Whitman in their race for governor of California.  The site was launched with 300 documents and 1,000 excerpts that will be added to daily as the race progresses allowing voters to hold the candidates accountable in during the campaign.

A computer-assisted analysis by Bloomberg News reporter Jonathan D. Salant of Federal Election Commission data found corporate political action committees siding with vulnerable Democratic incumbents, the candidates that Republicans need to beat if they are to take back control of the House of Representatives this fall.

Brian Joseph of The Orange County Register reports on how petitioners "tricked dozens of young Orange County voters into registering to vote as Republicans." Written complaints have been filed with state election officials by at least 99 people who have been unwittingly registered to vote Republican. A similar fraud landed eight petitioners in jail in 2006.

John McCain’s campaign headquarters sold blackberry phones chock full of internal information, according to a report by Tisha Thompson of Fox 5 (Washington, D.C.).  The campaign was trying to sell off old office inventory from its Arlington, Va. campaign offices, with everything from computers to file cabinets offered for bargain basement prices.  They also sold off Blackberry phones used by campaign staffers.  With help of  Rick Yarborough and  Steve Jones, Thompson obtained personal phone numbers, addresses, emails and photographs of campaign staffers, politicians, lobbyists and journalists from the phones she purchased at the sale.

Ian Demsky of The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash. found that nearly a third of the voters in Pierce County cast their ballots for Democratic president-elect Barack Obama and Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi. The article includes maps of the areas that went for Obama and Rossi and the county's results of both races.