The Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling will allow corporate interests to spend unlimited amounts trying to influence voters, something they've already proven themselves adept at on the state level. Case in point: the oil and gas industry has directed the majority of its political spending not on the campaigns of lawmakers, but on its own campaigns against ballot initiatives.

From 1998 to 2008 major oil and gas companies pumped over $120 million into state level elections. The vast majority of that did not go to influencing politicians, but rather to influencing the public to vote against ballot measures that would increase taxes on oil and gas companies.

Committees organized to influence the public to support or oppose ballot measures at the state level are governed by state laws, most of which allowed unlimited corporate or union contributions prior to the Citizens United decision.

A review of state-level campaign contributions, obtained through TransparencyData.com, shows that 73 percent of all campaign contributions made by major oil and gas companies went towards the group Californians Against Higher Taxes—No on 87, a group devoted to the defeat of the 2006 ballot measure, California Proposition 87.

Prop 87 would have levied taxes—between 1.6 percent and 6 percent—on companies extracting oil in California. The receipts were intended to create a $4 billion fund to invest in alternative energy, alternative energy vehicles and energy efficiency. After the oil & gas companies had dropped nearly $88 million into their campaign to defeat it, Prop 87 failed by a popular vote of 54 percent to 45 percent.

The major oil companies paid in full to defeat the proposition. Californians Against Higher Taxes received $38 million from Chevron, $32 million from Aera Energy, a joint venture of ExxonMobil and Shell, $9.5 million from Occidental Oil & Gas and over $3 million from both ConocoPhillips and BP.

A similar ballot measure made Colorado the number two recipient of oil and gas money at the state-level over the same period of time. From 1998 to 2008 major oil and gas interests spent $7.4 million in state-level Colorado politics. The vast majority of that was spent by one organization devoted to the defeat of one ballot measure.

Coloradans for a Stable Economy was organized by large oil and gas interests to oppose Amendment 58, a ballot measure that would have repealed a tax-exemption that favored the industry and used the funds—approximately $300 million—to pay for college scholarships, infrastructure improvements and renewable energy projects.

Major oil and gas companies dropped $7.2 million into Coloradans for a Stable Economy allowing it to run countless advertisements against the ballot measure. BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Encana Oil & Gas, ExxonMobil and Noble Energy each contributed over $1 million to the organization.

Amendment 58 failed when voters went to polls with a commanding 58 percent voting against adoption.

Oil and gas companies also spent big in Alaska, the fourth biggest recipient of contributions from the industry, on defeating a threatening ballot initiative.

General Ballot Initiative 2 would have raised taxes on natural gas reserves held in Alaska’s North Slope. The effort was intended to push the companies holding the reserves to construct a pipeline to extract the natural gas.

BP, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil all contributed handsomely to the defeat of Ballot Initiative 2. The initiative fell by a nearly 2-1 margin.

Neither Colorado nor Alaska saw much of the oil and gas contributions go to their politicians. In those states, the industry largesse was mostly focused on influencing voter opinions. Politicians in California, along with Texas and Louisiana, the two states rounding out the top five recipients of oil and gas money, however, reaped a good amount of industry money for their campaigns.

Chief among them is California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the recipient of $1.72 million in contributions from the oil and gas industry. The majority of that money came from the San Ramon, California-based Chevron.

A 2004 Associated Press article detailed Schwarzenegger’s adoption of many of Chevron’s desired policy agenda items. These included streamlining the refinery approval process and the processes of the agency that oversees mining and dredging in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Schwarzenegger also endorsed other oil industry priorities including offshore drilling (after the BP oil spill the governor dropped his support) and opposing Proposition 87.

Lawmakers throughout the legislature were targets for oil and gas money in Texas. Perhaps the state most closely link with the industry, oil and gas companies spread their money far and wide in Texas. The industry contributed to over 400 candidates.

The biggest recipients were current Gov. Rick Perry ($129,890) and former House Speaker Tom Craddick ($104,250). The industry also contributed heavily across the board to legislative and judicial campaigns. Most of these contributions went to Republicans candidates.

In Louisiana the largest contributions went to governors—Bobby Jindal, Kathleen Blanco, Mike Foster--and lawmakers—Max Malone and Heulette Fontenot--close to the industry. Other top recipients included leading members of the state Senate. Frontpage feature graphic courtesey of richardmasoner

Here are some of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and allies over the past week:

Last Saturday afternoon, C-SPAN broadcast an interview of Ellen Miller, Sunlight's executive director, discussing how the Internet is being used to provide transparency in the workings of government.

The Associated Press used data from the Center for Responsive Politics Chevron Corp. spent more than $12.8 million lobbying the federal government in the first half of this year, in an attempt to influence pending climate-change legislation and taxes targeting oil producers. So far this year, the oil giant has almost matched the $12.9 million they spent lobbying in all of 2008.

The Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker, the searchable database that allows users to easily follow the money and connect the dots within records of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) database, launched this week. ProPublica and Sunlight teamed up on the project that allows anyone to quickly learn what foreign governments are lobbying whom, how often and about what. Alex Knott with CQ Politics covered the launch and quotes Ellen saying how information contained on the site shows how effective lobbyists can be. "While it brings needed transparency to these filings, it raises the question of what lobbyists for health care, energy and other interests -- who disclose far less information -- are up to in Washington," she said. In this morning's "In the Loop" column, The Washington Post's Al Kamen highlighted the Tracker. "What? You don't have a registered foreign agent working for you?" he asked. "Everyone's got one. Even the Dalai Lama!"

Katherine Mangu-Ward, senior editor of Reason magazine, writing at The Wall Street Journal, penned a column titled "Transparency Chic," where she highlights several efforts by private groups and individuals to pry open government information. "Tech celebs like Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales have flocked to the Sunlight Foundation, which uses the Internet to improve meaningful access to government," she wrote.

ABC News' David Wright reported on the health care debate and includes a quote from Bill Allison, Sunlight's senior fellow, about the special interests attempts to influence the health care debate. Bill explained who's working for who: "Insurance companies battling providers. Drug companies battling insurance companies. Hospitals going to war against nursing homes. All kinds of institutions are looking to protect their interests."

McClatchy Newspapers editorialized about how the Obama administration is continuing some of the opaque practices of the Bush administration despite promises to the contrary. They cite Ellen's blog post from last week about the need for the White House to list presidential signing statements on its Web site in an easy-to-find manner as an example. A number of McClatchy papers ran the editorial, including The (Colorado Springs, Colo.) Gazette.

I've been out of Washington this week as you might have gathered from by tweeting but I did want to mention that this week, Sunlight supported CrocTail and CorpWatch API launched, aimed at providing easy access to SEC-derived corporate subsidiary data. Both are the handiwork of Corpwatch, a non-profit that employs investigative research and journalism to expose corporate malfeasance and to advocate for multinational corporate accountability and transparency. Here’s a link to CorpWatch’s press release announcing the launch.

CrocTail allows users to browse through information about several hundred thousand U.S. publicly traded corporations and their foreign and domestic subsidiaries. CorpWatch has parsed and annotated information from company SEC filings to highlight specific corporate accountability issues.

The goal is to make it easy for users to research the structure of corporations and pinpoint where they operate. For instance, CrocTail can help ferret out such corporate abuses as multinational tax-avoidance and the use of off-shore subsidiaries to evade responsibility for human rights abuses. Tonya Hennessey, CorpWatch’s project director, gives two egregious examples of corporations using subsidiaries to hide their investments in dictatorial and violent regimes: Chevron in Burma and Marathon Oil in Equatorial Guinea, two of the most repressive governments on the planet.

The CorpWatch API provides a well-structured interface for Web programs to query and process subsidiary data, easing the use of SEC data, which is not standardized otherwise.

Check CorpWatch out! CrocTail and CorpWatch’s API are their latest efforts to expose war profiteering, fraud, environmental, human rights and other abuses by multinationals, and to provide critical information to foster a more informed public and an effective democracy. Sunlight supported CorpWatch’s new programs.