The Big Picture · How the entire system works · Updated 2026-05-17

Donor money in. Public dollars out. The same hands on both ends.

A Nevada State Assembly seat costs about $200,000 to win. State Senate, about $400,000. Statewide office, several million. That money has to come from somewhere. It comes from people who want something specific from state government.

The five doors

There are exactly five doors through which private money buys public policy in Nevada. Each one is legal. Each one is public-record. None of them are accidents.

Door 1 — Direct contributions

A donor writes a check (or a PAC writes one) to a candidate's campaign committee. NRS 294A caps contributions at $10,000 per election from any one source. Most donors find their way around the cap by giving through entities: an LLC owned by the same person, a PAC, a federal-side committee. Nevada Campaign Contributions documents 101,224 candidate, donor, and committee pages across 2006–2025.

Door 2 — Lobbying spend

Carson City lobbyists are required by NRS 218H to register and disclose. The reports filed by lobbyists (Form 1) and by lobbyist employers (Form 2) are public. The dollar amounts are real — and the pattern of "client + lobbyist + bill drop + recorded vote" is documented across thousands of bill files. NPE catalogs every registered lobbyist back to 2017.

Door 3 — Career promises (the revolving door)

The implicit job offer. A legislator who votes the gaming industry's way is hired by the gaming industry the year after she leaves office. A regulator at the Public Utilities Commission goes to work for the utility. A staff director becomes a lobbyist. None of this is illegal. All of it is documented. See our revolving-door page for named examples.

Door 4 — Dark money

501(c)(4) "social welfare" organizations and Section 527 political committees move money between themselves, layer-by-layer, with the original donor stripped off the disclosure. The Arabella Network on the left (Sixteen Thirty Fund, Hopewell Fund, New Venture Fund) and corporate trade-association coordinating PACs on the right both rely on this layering. See our dark-money page for the chain.

Door 5 — The state contract loop

A company holds a state contract — paving, lobbying, IT services, gaming-machine maintenance, foster-care placement, Medicaid managed-care administration. The company donates to the legislators with oversight of its contract. The legislators do not recuse. See our vendor-donors page for documented cases.

The bipartisan map

Pay-for-play is not a party. Both Republican and Democratic legislators run on it. The donor names are different; the mechanism is identical:

Why it persists

1. Public records don't read themselves. The Secretary of State, the Legislature, the IRS, federal procurement databases — all publish in formats nobody outside our tiny ecosystem actually checks. We exist because nobody else does the joining.
2. Compliance is theater. NRS 281A (ethics in government) requires disclosure of conflicts. Disclosure is not recusal. A legislator can disclose that her employer is a state vendor and then still vote on her employer's contract.
3. Voters don't know. Most AD-42 voters have never heard of HCA Nevada Good Government PAC. Most NV residents could not name a single member of the Public Utilities Commission. We change that.

What we do about it

We publish. That is the entire intervention. Voters who know the donor list and the voting record can make their own assessment at the ballot box. Voters who don't, can't. Pay for Play Nevada is the publication layer that makes the latter into the former.

Start with our Tracy Brown-May case study, then walk through the five doors above. By the end you'll know what to look for in your own district.