This year, MuckRock has launched a new election project with the nonpartisan research organization Sunlight Search to investigate and provide a full background on candidates running for office in 2024. Our latest story, “How MuckRock found the backstory of a mystery congressional candidate in Southern California through public records,” uncovered California Republican congressional candidate Margarita Wilkinson’s previously-unreported background through public records.

During this process, the team discovered one of the most painstaking parts of this investigation: analyzing Wilkinson’s personal financial disclosure report. After filing the disclosure past its reporting deadline, Wilkinson submitted the completed form with nearly 500 assets and sources of unearned income listed out — all handwritten.

Handwritten disclosure forms can significantly hinder the public’s ability to analyze financial information, according to experts.

“It’s very hard for the public to make sense of that and see what’s really going on,” says Campaign Legal Center’s Senior Legal Counsel Delaney Marsco.

As seen in Business Insider’s analysis of assets, investments, outside employment, and debts of congressional lawmakers, they excluded four members of Congress whose disclosures were uniquely complicated and lengthy, comprising hundreds of pages of handwritten or scanned documents.

For this story, understanding Wilkinson’s personal financial disclosure form was particularly important because she has been largely self-funding her own campaign.

Despite the challenges, MuckRock and Sunlight Search combed through each line of her disclosure form, used DocumentCloud to perform basic optical-character recognition and reproduced each line in a Google Sheet, to better analyze Wilkinson’s wealth, which totaled to at least $31.1 million and as much as $85.7 million.

After subtracting her reported liabilities, the Wilkinsons’ net worth is at least $21.1 million and as much as $83.7 million.

Over the coming months, we’ll be reporting on political candidates who are running in the 2024 election and providing a guide on our backgrounding process. If you have a tip or want to collaborate with us, email us at news@muckrock.com.

The Update

• Judge orders Maryland to turn over autopsy reports: After a yearlong legal battle, the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner must turn over full autopsy reports to The Baltimore Banner, writes the Banner’s Brenna Smith. Monday’s ruling ends a lawsuit filed by The Baltimore Banner against the medical examiner’s office when it refused to fill a public records request in 2022, though the state could appeal.

• Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy: The Freedom of the Press Foundation is hiring for the Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy. The position was established in honor of its co-founder, who passed away in 2023. FPF is looking for an experienced, full-time advocate to lead the national fight against excessive government secrecy.

• Missouri governor addresses childcare deserts: Missouri Gov. Mike Parson has made childcare a top priority in his legislative agenda, reports Anna Spoerre and Clara Bates in The Missouri Independent. An investigation by The Independent and MuckRock last year found that almost half of Missouri’s children under age five, or about 202,000 children, live in child care deserts.

• Trump tax leaker sentenced to five years in prison: Former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn was sentenced to five years in prison for leaking thousands of tax documents, including those of former President Donald Trump, to The New York Times and ProPublica. The sentencing document is available on DocumentCloud.

• Long Covid deaths continue to be miscounted: The Center for Disease Control and Prevention released new data on deaths caused by Long Covid, reporting that more than 5,000 Americans have died from this disease since 2020, reports Betsy Ladyzhets in The Sick Times. Medical education is incredibly varied among people who fill out death certificates, and this variability has contributed to undercounting of Covid-19 deaths, according to MuckRock’s reporting from 2022.

FOIA Finds

• Working with student journalists: The Markup worked with five students at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY to send public records requests to 25 different police departments that had partnerships with Ring. The newsroom explains how they coordinated their FOI auditing process with student reporters.

• Desantis’ contractor behind migrant relocation flyers: Fliers promoting “free migrant relocation trips,” posted at a church in east Orlando, were created by a state contractor for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ highly-publicized relocation initiative, reports Ryan Gillepse in the Orlando Sentinel. ($$ Paywall $$) The records were obtained by the nonprofit American Oversight and have been uploaded to DocumentCloud.

• Michigan universities’ struggle with FOIA: Reporters at MLive/The Ann Arbor News analyzed how large universities deal with FOIA requests in Michigan. They made identical requests to each Michigan public university in June, seeking the list of other FOIA requests; the number of staff that handle FOIA requests; and budgets for the FOIA offices. The results found that, for example, the University of Michigan received 436 requests between January and mid-June 2023 and spent less than $500,000 on FOIA, with four staff members. ($$ Paywall $$)