Every number in this report comes from a filing that Florida law required someone to make. We downloaded the Broward County Supervisor of Elections' complete campaign-finance exports — 69,589 contribution rows and 35,724 expenditure rows covering 357 candidates and committees across 87 offices — and read them together.

Broward is Florida's second-largest county, with 1.95 million residents. Its campaign money divides into two structures that barely touch each other. The county commission and the constitutional offices are funded by a land-use industry of developers, builders, engineers and the law firms that represent them. The courthouse is funded by the candidates themselves.

The scale

Judicial races are the county's second-largest category of campaign money, behind only the County Commission and ahead of a school district that is among the largest in the United States.

Who funds the courthouse

Ninety-two judicial campaigns filed across thirty-two county judicial groups, drawing money from 6,112 distinct donors. The largest single source of that money was the candidates.

Of the seventy-one judicial campaigns that raised more than $20,000, thirty-seven — 52% — were majority self-funded. Eleven single gifts of between $95,000 and $200,000 went from a candidate to her own committee, totalling $1,200,000. Four campaigns in the county disclosed funding of exactly 100%.

Jill K. Levy raised $600,000 for County Court Judge Group 29 and supplied all of it herself, in two gifts. She was the only candidate in that group who raised any money at all.

Why this is not the scandal it looks like

The conventional worry about judicial campaign money runs in exactly the opposite direction. Judicial races are ordinarily funded by lawyers — often by lawyers who will later appear before the judge they helped elect. That is the structural problem the literature on judicial elections has been describing for forty years, and it is the reason Florida bars judicial candidates from personally soliciting contributions.

A candidate who writes her own cheque removes that problem. By the standard measure of donor dependence, Jill Levy's wholly self-funded $600,000 campaign has the smallest outside-interest footprint of any major campaign in this dataset — the cleanest filing in Broward, not the most troubling. The same holds for Olga Levine, Kathleen McHugh and Anthony Robbins, each at 100%.

The data supports that reading at the category level too. Judicial races are the one major Broward office where organised and statewide money is close to absent.

Nor is self-funding buying a decisive advantage. Among the seventy-one judicial campaigns above $20,000, the thirty-seven majority-self-funded ones had a median raise of $92,074 and the thirty-four donor-funded ones $78,918. The gap is narrow and runs the wrong way for a theory about money overwhelming opponents. It looks less like an advantage purchased than a cost of entry in low-visibility races where no organised constituency exists to raise from.

The part that is a finding

What remains, once the implication of wrongdoing is set aside, is a question about access rather than integrity.

Six of Broward's thirty-two county judicial groups recorded only a single candidate raising any money at all.

If the practical route to a county judgeship in Broward runs through a six-figure personal loan — and in 52% of contested-enough races above $20,000 it did — then the field of people who can realistically run is narrower than the field of people qualified to serve. That is a structural observation about who can afford to stand, not a criticism of anyone who could and did. The candidates in these filings complied with the law and disclosed what the law required them to disclose; several of them have since served or are serving on the bench.

Two readings of the same numbers therefore stand together, and we publish both:

• Self-funding reduces the appearance of obligation. A judge who took no money from the trial bar cannot be said to owe it anything. On Broward's own figures the self-funded bench is the least donor-dependent part of county government.
• Self-funding raises the entry price. Judicial office in Broward has frequently been reached by candidates able to advance their campaigns substantial sums from personal resources, and in six groups nobody else raised money to contest it.

Which of those matters more is a judgement about democratic design, not about any individual. We do not resolve it here.

What the trial bar actually supplies

A naive sector sweep of the filings returns a law-firm and attorney bloc of $9,981,943 — 27.7% of all county money. That figure should not be used, and we do not use it. Its largest entries are candidate-lawyers giving to themselves: Mark Bogen $515,903, Adam Cervera $302,165, Jennifer Hilal $202,429, Allison Gilman $200,833. Counting a lawyer's loan to her own campaign as "law-firm money" double-counts the self-funding we have already measured and inflates the bar's apparent role.

Restricted to non-self judicial money — the only defensible basis — law-firm and attorney-linked donors supplied $1,077,893 of $3,557,696, or 30.3%. Lawyers are, as expected, the largest single outside source of judicial campaign money in Broward. They are also supplying less than a third of a pool that is itself only 46.1% of judicial funding, which puts the trial bar's share of all judicial money nearer 14%.

The firms with the widest reach give in amounts far too small to suggest leverage over any individual officeholder. Becker & Poliakoff gave $73,626 across 62 campaigns — the widest campaign reach of any entity in the dataset — an average of $1,188 each. The Corradino Group gave $94,000 across 44 campaigns, averaging $2,136. Ronald Book and his firm gave $99,500 across 51 recipients, averaging $1,951. This is the pattern of maintaining broad access, not of concentrating influence.

The other structure: the land-use bloc

Beside the self-financed bench sits Broward's broadest organised interest. Grouping developers, builders, engineers and land-use law firms — and excluding candidate self-funding from both the numerator and the denominator — produces $4,580,039, or 12.7% of all county money, from 3,493 donors across 6,792 gifts. It reached 253 campaigns in 65 offices.

The contrast with the courthouse is the point of this report. The land-use industry supplies 28.8% of the County Commission's outside money and 28.3% of the Property Appraiser's, and 4.7% of the judiciary's. The two institutions that decide land use and land valuation are funded by the people with the most direct interest in those decisions. The institution that decides cases is funded by the people running for it.

  LAND-USE BLOC                        CANDIDATES' OWN FUNDS
  $4,580,039 / 3,493 donors            $4,164,799 (judicial)
          │                                     │
          ├──► County Commission 28.8%          │
          ├──► Property Appraiser  28.3%        │
          ├──► School Board        15.7%        │
          ├──► Committees / ECOs   11.7%        │
          └──► Judiciary            4.7% ◄──────┤  53.9% of
                                                │  judicial money
                                                │  (245 loan rows,
                                                ▼   $4,245,550)
                              178 disclosed repayments
                              back to candidates: $1,893,508

The repayments, read correctly

Candidate names appear in the expenditure table alongside mail houses and consultants, which can mislead a reader scanning for vendors. These rows are loan retirement — a campaign returning money its own candidate had lent it, as the law contemplates and requires be disclosed.

The vendors

Broward's political service market is concentrated in a way the county's size does not require. One mail vendor, Victory Political Mail, received $1,735,226 across 98 payments from 28 campaigns spanning 22 distinct offices — 5.1% of every dollar spent by every campaign in the county over twelve years, and active in every cycle from 2014 to 2026. It took $540,542 from eight judicial campaigns, which is 7.4% of all judicial spending.

The seats

Two things are visible at once. Group 29 and Group 30 are seats where one candidate raised money and no one else did. But the Supervisor of Elections race shows a top filer at only 19.4% of the seat's money with a 1.1x spread over the runner-up, and the Clerk of the Circuit Court at 24.3% and 1.1x across thirteen campaigns. Commission District 3 and School Board Districts 3 and 4 are similarly flat. Broward is not a county of uniformly pre-empted races.

What Broward is not

Two interests widely assumed to control Broward politics are close to absent from its county filings, and the correction matters more than the finding.

Gambling. A naive keyword sweep returns $459,450, or 1.28% of county money. Hand inspection shows that figure is overstated by at least 38.8%: its two largest "matches" are not gambling interests at all but judicial candidates self-funding, caught by surname collision — Betsy Benson at $120,383 and Elizabeth McHugh at $57,924 — and several more are committees whose names merely contain the word "Better". The defensible directly attributable total is roughly $150,000 to $180,000, under 0.5% of county money. The Seminole Tribe of Florida gave $61,000 in Broward across the entire twelve-year window, $60,000 of it to a single committee — against $46,077,373 to Florida state political committees, a ratio of 755 to one. West Flagler Associates gave $4,000 locally and $15,101,706 at state level. If the concern is casino influence over Broward's elected county government, these filings do not support it. The money is in Tallahassee, where gaming compacts are decided.

The education blocs. Broward has one of the largest school districts in the country, and $4,103,668 of campaign money attached to its board. Teachers-union linked donors supplied 0.7% of it; charter and private-education linked donors 0.2%. The Florida Education Association, which gave $6,119,106 to state committees, gave $4,500 in Broward. The largest institutional School Board donor in the county is an engineering firm. School Board money here, like judicial money, is overwhelmingly the candidates' own: Adam Cervera $300,250, Allen Zeman $227,800, Lori Alhadeff $101,427.

What we did not find

• No criminal referral, indictment, charge or conviction involving anyone named.
• No Commission on Ethics finding of probable cause, and no judicial-conduct finding.
• No undisclosed contribution and no undisclosed loan — everything here was filed as required, including the loan character and the repayments.
• No evidence of a quid pro quo, and no agreement to exchange anything of value for official action, judicial or otherwise.
• No evidence that any case was decided improperly, and no finding about any ruling by any judge.
• No evidence that any contract was awarded improperly, and no finding about any procurement.
• No election irregularity of any kind.

The finding

Broward's judges are the least donor-dependent officials in the county, because they paid for their own campaigns. That removes one problem and introduces another: in six of thirty-two judicial groups, nobody without the means to do the same put their name forward with any money behind it.

The second finding is about the rest of county government, and it is the ordinary one. The land-use industry supplies 28.8% of the County Commission's outside money and 28.3% of the Property Appraiser's — the two offices whose decisions most directly determine what land is worth and what may be built on it. Every dollar of it was disclosed. Nobody is required to tell voters any of this; the filings are public, and reading them is not automatic.

Corrections and challenges to any figure in this report: corrections@florida.institute. We publish corrections in full. Any judge, judicial candidate or committee named here may submit a response and we will publish it alongside this report.