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April 15 came and went yesterday. You might have been thinking taxes. But Virginia's political candidates had a different deadlline in mind: the deadline for first quarter fundraising reports.

That includes three Democrats and a Republican seeking the governor’s mansion at the top, and closer to home in Roanoke, a small herd of Republicans and a single Democrat seeking the 17th district House of Delegates seat vacated by the retiring William Fralin.

The source of candidates’ funds are a matter of public record all across the country, but the reports aren’t always easy to learn about. In Virginia, we’re fortunate to have the Virginia Public Access Project.

VPAP is a non-profit organization funded by a consortium of newspapers. Led by former Roanoke Times reporter David Poole, it’s purpose is to collect process and present online all manner of candidate and elected official financial disclosure information, from the gifts elected officials have received, to the activities of lobbyists, to the money raised by political candidates.

So, if you want to know where Republican candidate for governor Bob McDonnell got the impressive $2.2 million he’s raised since Jan. 1, you can find out at vpap.org. Nearly half of it came from the Republican Governors Association, by the way. Some $15,000 of it came from four donors in the 24018 zip code in Roanoke. And yes, you can drill down to see exactly who the individual donors are.

You can also see where fundraising front runner Terry McAuliffe, a democrat, turned up the stunning $4.2 million he raised in the same period. The names can be pretty fascinating, like Donald Trump, who gave $25,000, and Bill Clinton, who gave $10,000. And you can also see that darn little of his money came from the western half of Virginia.

And you can see that Democrat Gwen Mason, running for the 17th House seat, has raised close to $40,000, while her five Republican opponents, who are still jockeying for their party’s nomination, aren’t even out of the gate yet.

The information’s all there, and in a bunch of different ways. If you care to look, it’s an engrossing tale of power and influence and the making of favors. All brought to you by the wisdom of open government.

When it comes to birthing presidents, Virginia is still the queen mother, with eight. Yeah, we’re in a bit of a dry spell – our last was number 28, Woodrow Wilson – but still. Ohio is still one behind at seven.

But we’re spoiled that way. Giving a president to the union is still a rare privilege – so rare that more than half of the states in our union have yet to achieve it.

We added a new one to the list just yesterday, and it was the relatively new kid on the block: Hawaii. Barack Obama might hail from the Land of Lincoln (who, by the way, was born in Kentucky, not Illinois) but he was born in the 50^th state.

I wonder if that gives folks in states who haven’t made the list yet – Wisconsin, Wyoming, Oregon, Mississippi, Louisiana, the Dakotas, Alabama, and 21 more – any feeling of inferiority.

No offense to Hawaii, but it’s the territorial equivalent of an expansion team.

I mean, what if you’re from Rhode Island? You’re one of the thirteen original colonies, right next door to Massachusetts, birthplace of four presidents, and one of the cradles of our great nation, and Hawaii makes the list before you.

It must be a bit like being a Cubs fan and seeing the expansion Florida Marlins collect a World Series title after a couple of years in the league.

But don’t lose heart, Rhode Island, Arizona, New Mexico, Hawaii, Florida, and others.

You get another at bat every four years.

Here's the tally:

When you think of corrupt spots on the U.S. map, you might naturally think of Illinois. And certainly moreso with the arrest of Gov. Rod Blagojevich on federal corruption charges this week. Or maybe you think of Florida. Plenty of shenanigans down Miami way over the years, right?

But where would you put Virginia? I've lived here my whole life, and while journalists love a good corrupt official to chew on, I don't think of my homestate as a place with a steady diet of crooked officials.

But one study by a publication called the Corporate Crime Reporter ranked Virginia 12th, at least among the 35 most populous states in the union. Louisiana was first, followed by Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, Ohio and finally, at #6, Illinois. Florida was 8th.

CCR took a report from the U.S. Justice Department on prosecutions on federal corruption charges and calculated a rate of the number of charges in a state from 1997 to 2006 per 100,000 residents.

Here's a look at the number of convictions in Virginia's two federal judicial districts by year from the DOJ report:

That's a total of 278 convictions over 10 years, which is way more than I would have imagined. The vast majority, though, are in the Eastern District. (This comes from a set of tables at the end of the DOJ report, by the way.)

By comparison, Illinois had 524, Louisiana had 329, and Florida had 809. Florida's Southern District had the most of any judicial district with 574.  Washington D.C. had 390, but the city's too small to make the top 35 considered, plus it's the nation's capital and is rather more overrun with public officials to begin with.

We should bear in mind that the numbers reflect not only the level of corruption, but also the interest of particular U.S. Attorneys in these kinds of cases, those same prosecutors' ability to get convictions, and other factors.

And, what the numbers don't reflect is similar kinds of cases that go through state courts. Think of Roanoke City Councilman Alfred Dowe, who double-dipped on his expense reimbursements, and whose case is before state courts. And then there's former Henry County Administrator Sid Clower, who took taxpayers for over $800,000, and was prosecuted in state court, but also picked up some charges at the federal level.

On the upside, those kinds of cases are fairly rare around here. And if you're still looking for comfort, at least our governor's name is not on the lips of every blogger and late-night comedian in the country. And if that's still not enough, be glad our governor doesn't have that peculiar hairstyle. I can stomach Gov. Tim Kaine's energetic eyebrow as long he's not selling off senate seats.

Here's a fun new way to find out what your elected officials are doing up in Richmond. The Virginia Public Access Project, for years now the place to go to find campaign finance data, now offers a database of lobbying activity in the state.

It's fun, fascinating, worrisome, and also disturbingly unreliable.

And that's not a knock on VPAP. It's a knock on Virginia's method of collecting this data, and it's utter lack of a means to see if it's accurate.

VPAP took the forms filed by lobbyists and their clients and reduced them to a terrifically well put-together database that allows you to track lobbying activity by who hired the lobbyist, who the lobbyist is, who got lobbied, the restaurants where they got lobbied, and so on.

As our Richmond reporter, Mike Sluss, reported in today's paper, you can learn some eye-opening stuff from the database. For example, payday lenders spent nearly $4 million on lobbying efforts to defeat legislation that put new restrictions on their industry.

But you can get a lot more details. Check out, for example, the popularity of Washington Redskins tickets as a lobbying carrot.

So there's data there, but at some levels, it's hard to tell if it's complete, if it's accurate, and if it says what you think it says.

That's because the state's reporting requirements are about as air-tight as the fishnets on the cigarette girl at the Tobacco Company.

As Sluss reports, the forms are filed with the office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, but that office "does not have any type of auditing powers" to ensure the completeness or accuracy of the reports, said Chris Frink, the office's lobbying specialist.

Is it me, or does that fact sound like an invitation to write down whatever you want, who is ever going to check? (Well, except for you and me, now that we can look at this stuff online.)

The form asks filers to describe the lobbying activities conducted. Sluss cites one example in a filing by Phillip Morris USA: "All matters pertaining to the manufaccture, distribution, sale and use of tobacco products." Well, that's useful information. They might as well have written, "None of your @#$%!! business." And if they had, who would have known the difference?

Another issue has to do with the numbers they report. The reports require naming legislators who attend functions with a cost of $50 per person or more. Apparently, the common practice is to take the cost and divide it by the number of people in attendance. That might be appropriate for a catered affair that was actually billed per head. But what if it's a dinner where everyone orders off the menu, and Delegate X orders a $35 steak, the creme broulee and two bottles of wine, while Senator Y stops in for one cocktail? Using the division of the total cost, it would appear on the report lawmakers X and Y both received the same benefit from the lobbyist, which is both grossly inaccurate and grossly unfair to Senatory Y.

In fact, Sluss cites an example very much like that, in which House of Delegates Majority Leader Morgan Griffith (R-Salem) attended a function where he, after much offering, said he accepted a glass of tea or cranberry juice. But on the report filed for that event, Griffith was down for a full $127 share of the bill.

And then there's this: divide the bill by enough people to get it to below $50 per person, and you don't have to name names

No doubt there are some lobbyists and clients out there who don't abuse this slack system and follow the spirit of the law even though they apparently don't have to.

But the transparency of our political process demands something weightier than the spirit of the law. Spirits are fleeting things. Spirits have no teeth.  And this is a situation in serious need of some teeth.

Now, let's see, where are those teeth going to come from? Who makes laws in this state? Oh, yes, the very legislators who can exploit this vaguery to the own benefit, if they so choose.

Legislators can be persuaded. But who is going lobby them to make such a change?

I'm reluctant to bring this up and to reignite the really zealous -- and sometimes just nasty -- give and take you all had over my post about how many people attended the Sarah Palin rally in Salem.

But, in the interest of thorough reporting, here goes:

You might recall that the estimates ranged from 12,000 to as high as 20,000, but the most common figure reported in various print, online and broadcast sources was 16,000. It turns out that is the most reliable number, because, according to the Salem police, it's based largely on the number of people who passed through metal detectors on their way in to the stadium.

Lt. Mike Green told our police reporter, Amanda Codispoti, yesterday that the walk through metal detector scanned about 15,000 people. Only dignitaries did not pass through the detector, and organizers estimated the number of dignitaries at 1,000.  So, 15,000 regular folks plus 1,000 VIPs gets you to that oft-mentioned figure of 16,000.

Ralph Berrier, my friend and colleague, recently wrote a small item for the paper about his obsession with polls, his insensible desire to find any evidence that his candidate was gaining ground or holding steady.

This year, of all years, it was hard to know what to trust. The number of polling companies seems limitless -- Gallup, Marist, Zogby, Mason-Dixon, Survey USA, and so on -- as did the variety in the results.

Even for polls on the same day.

In the same spot on the map.

The results were all over the place. You could seemingly find evidence for any trend you hoped for -- a widening nationally, a tightening in battleground states, or whatever.

Pollsters start with certain assumptions about voter turnout among certain groups, and certain ideas about who is registered to vote and who will actually vote. There are registered voter models, likely voter models, and so on.

The trouble this year was, could anybody really know what the electorate look like? With 500,000 new registered voters in Virginia, for example, would a pollsters old assumptions still stand up?

Inevitably, you wonder, now that the only poll that matters has been conducted -- the election -- did anybody get it right? At least I wondered.

So, without putting a lot of work into it, here's a snapshot of polls versus results. Read more »

So you can't stand it, you gotta know how it's going. Votes don't get counted until late tonight -- if not into tomorrow or into December.

You can watch early returns in key places tonight after the polls close to get a glimpse of how it might be going for your candidate. My boss, Dwayne Yancey, wrote about five (or more) places to watch for that purpose in a column in Sunday's paper.

But suppose you don't want wait that long. Well, you can always look at turnout. And I'm here to help you.

I'll be endeavoring to post at least two updates on turnout in precincts in Roanoke, Roanoke County, Salem, Montgomery County and Radford.

Here's an idea of what to look for:

Will young people, notoriously low in turnout, really come out this year? Conventional wisdom says big youth turnout helps Obama. To gauge it, watch turnout numbers for E-1 (St. Michael's Lutheran Church) and F-1 (Luther Memorial Lutheran Church) in Blacksburg, the East precinct in Radford, and both North Salem precincts.

What about black voters? Roanoke is a highly segregated city, so some precincts have very high percentages of black voters. Watch precincts like Lincoln Terrace, Melrose, Villa Heights and Eureka Park. All historically vote overwhelmingly for Democrats in presidential races, but also have low turnout -- just over 50 percent in 2004.

To gauge Republican turnout, watch Roanoke County's Bonsack precinct. While John Kerry didn't win a single precinct in Roanoke County, Bonsack went 72 percent for George W. Bush. Others to watch include the Orchards in Roanoke County, Auburn High School in Montgomery County, and Beverly Heights in Salem, all of which went for Bush in large numbers in 2004.

Some 10 a.m. turnout data is already available, so check it out here.

You all are still chewing on those Barack Obama attendance estimates from the Democratic presidential candidate's visit to Roanoke last week. And some of you are chewing on each other, too.

So, here's a similar round-up of attendance estimates for Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's stop in Salem Monday.

I'm not surprised to find more wide-ranging numbers here. Outdoor events, with thousands of people standing on a ball field, are notoriously hard to estimate. It's not like you can't count the number of chairs in a row and multiply by the number of rows. Of all the numbers and news sources, only one estimate is attributed to a specific source in the publication.

So, here's what I found out there on Google News and on local news sites:

The Roanoke Times reported an "estimated crowd of 16,000." Mason Adams told me this morning the source was Carey Harveycutter, director of Salem's civic facilities.

The Associated Press reports a "crowd of 12,000," a number repeated in a different version of the AP story in USA Today.

WSET television out of Lynchburg gave a count of 16,000, but attributed it to "Republican officials."

Roanoke's WSLS NewsChannel 10 said Palin spoke to "a roaring crowd of more than 14,000."

WDBJ7 reported two numbers, at one point saying "about 12,000," and at another time saying "some put the estimates at 16,000."

And the highest estimate came from a Roanoke Valley community news site, called ourvalley.org, which put the number at "more than 20,000."

Salem stadium has been only rarely used for events like the Palin rally in the past, I suspect because until last year it had a natural grass field which wouldn't hold up well under all that foot traffic.

Salem officials sent out a list of the biggest crowds in the venue. Three were football games, with the biggest crowd reaching 10,000-pus in 1989. But the biggest event by far was the Franklin Graham Festival, an evangelistic gathering over several days.

Salem officials said 53,000 attended over three days, with more than 15,000 on one day. But The Roanoke Times put the number on day much higher than that: "an estimated 21,000."
The audience "filled the bleachers and field seats, overflowing onto the grassy berm at one end of the football field," Cody Lowe wrote. "Still, it was Saturday's attendance - estimated at more than 15,000 despite driving rain and thunder - that continued to impress the folks who staged the event."

Part of a comment by Roanoke R n R on this morning’s post about why Obama came to the Roanoke Civic Center intrigued me:

“What I do find really interesting is that if the numbers are correct...only 6,500 people showed up at a venue that can hold over 3,000 more, was free, and people didn't even need to get a ticket to attend.”

That got me wondering about the number myself. I decided to poke around Google news to see what numbers people were reporting. I’m the first to admit we reporters can get wild of reality in these estimates sometimes (Roanoke R n R is right to be skeptical), but not so much this time.

The Washington Independent, Reuters, and CBS News all put the attendance at 8,000.

WSET in Lynchburg reported mid-rally that “the Coliseum holds about 10,000 people and it is filled to capacity right now.” (The Roanoke Civic Center website reports the capacity this way: "10,600 In The Round (general admission); 10,500 Proscenium Stage; 8,672 Hockey; 5,626 Basketball.")

A news source called AFP put it at 8,250.

Naturally, I wanted to know what number we’d be reporting, too. So, when my colleague Mason Adams, who has the unfortunate fate of seeing me five feet from him everytime he looks up from his computer, came in from covering the rally, I asked him the number.

His immediate response: 8,250.

His source: The Roanoke City Fire Marshall, based apparently on counts from clickers at the doors.

And, just for the sake of trivia -- and what is any of this but trivia? -- if this were a ticketed event, it would rank among last year's best-selling Roanoke Civic Center events at No. 4, behind the Winter Jam contemporary Christian music show, and just a head of Disney's High School Musical on Ice.

I'm not kidding.

Why is Barack Obama here, when a bonifide presidential nominee hasn't been here in 48 years?

For the first time since 1964, Virginia matters. Which is to say, neither party is taking it for granted that Virginia will be as reliably red this year as it has been in the last 10 presidential elections. Check out Virginia's presidential voting record -- county-by-county -- back to 1980 on our interactive map. (Click on "Explore.")

Virginia is in play this year, as polls show. Voter registrations are also up dramatically, especially in areas that tend to vote Democratic, further suggesting the possibility that Obama could actually turn Virginia blue. Roanoke and Blacksburg, both places likely to vote Democratic, are among the top gainers in the state in registered voters since 2004.

You're thinking, no, we’ve had presidents here before. Franklin Roosevelt famously came through to dedicate the VA Medical Center in Salem. After his term in office, Jimmy Carter used to pass through all the time, usually stopping for a McDonald’s Sunday. It got to where it was barely news that he was here.

George W. Bush came here during the primary season in 2000, and also attended the D-Day Memorial dedication in Bedford. Former President Bill Clinton has been here twice in the last few months. Ronald Reagan came through decades ago – when he was just a member of the oft-maligned Hollywood elite.

Ronald Reagan on the set of WDBJ-7 back in the day. Photo from Old Roanoke.

And just the other night Libertarian Bob Barr hung out at Corned Beef and Co.

But the last time a major party nominee came through in the heat of an election was John F. Kennedy in 1960. And about all he did was get off the airplane and shake some hands. He was also interviewed by a young WDBJ reporter named Forrest “Frosty” Landon, later to retired as executive editor of The Roanoke Times.

Frosty Landon interviews John F. Kennedy in 1960. Photo from Old Roanoke.

But as I recall Frosty telling me once about this photo, which hung in his office when he worked here, Kennedy came to Roanoke as an afterthought. It was days before the election, and somebody suggested he might have a chance in Virginia. So, basically, Kennedy's plane popped out of the sky to land at what was then called Woodrum Field, so he could stand on the tarmac and shake some hands. And then off he went.

This year, neither party is treating us an afterthought.