Sign up to follow compelling stories of Californians in pictures.Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, engages in a discussion during a panel titled “AI, Ethics, and Elections” at an event marking the 50th anniversary of the Political Reform Act at the McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento on Sept. 11, 2024. Photo by Jungho Kim for CalMattersDespite inconsistencies and flaws in the Fair Political Practices Commission’s enforcement data, we found 15% of investigations took more than two years to resolve.
When we started reporting on this story, we began with a straightforward question: How long does it take for the commission to resolve cases? The answer was not easy to find.Throughout our investigation, we filed nine public records requests, analyzed more than 3,000 pages of documents and spoke to a total of 25 people, including former and current commissioners and staffers, ethics advocates, state and local elected officials and people who have filed complaints with the commission.
Meanwhile, to double-check that data, we also compared the results from our records request with a data analysis of open and closed cases that we downloaded directly from the commission’sRecords request database: A database of open and closed cases we received from the commission in response to our public records request. The earliest record was a case opened in 2002; the next earliest was opened in 2009. We narrowed down the database to only contain cases opened since 2017.