Every campaign-finance figure on this site comes from a candidate committee's California Form 460 filing, retrieved from NetFile. This page defines each number we post and the exact Form 460 line it comes from, so any figure can be traced back to the public record.
California candidate committees file the Form 460 (Recipient Committee Campaign Statement) with their local filing officer. Torrance committees file through NetFile, and the public filings are at netfile.com/public/TOR/campaign. We load the full filing export (all schedules) and compute the figures below from it.
Form 460 has a Summary page (numbered lines) and detail schedules: Schedule A (monetary contributions), Schedule B (loans), Schedule C (non-monetary contributions), and others. Donation figures come from Schedule A; loans from Schedule B.
The sum of itemized and unitemized monetary contributions the committee reported (Form 460 Schedule A; Summary Line 1), net of refunds, totaled across the current election cycle. This is money from donors. It includes the candidate's own monetary contributions to their committee (see Self-funded), because those are reported as contributions on Schedule A. It does not include loans or non-monetary contributions.
The portion of Donations that came from the candidate's own monetary contributions to their committee. A candidate's contributions to their own campaign are not subject to the $1,000 per-donor limit that applies to other contributors, so we surface this separately to show how much of the total came from the candidate rather than from supporters.
The committee's outstanding loan balance — money the campaign borrowed and still owes — from Form 460 Schedule B, Part 1, as of the most recent filing. This is reported net of repayments and forgiveness (it is the balance still owed, not the gross amount borrowed). For every Torrance candidate in this election, the lender is the candidate themselves, so we label these self-loans. Loans are not part of Donations: they are borrowed money the campaign may repay, shown as a separate line. We verify our loan figure against the Form 460 Summary (Line 2) on every load.
All derived from the itemized contributions on Schedule A. These describe the donor base and are computed only from contributions, so loans never affect them.
The headline PAC spending figure is independent expenditures: money spent to support or oppose a candidate by committees other than the candidate's own, which California does not cap, drawn from Form 496 (independent expenditures) and Form 497 (late contributions). We keep it separate from the candidate's own Donations total, so the two can be added for a fuller funding picture. We also surface these PACs' direct campaign donations (Form 460 Schedule A) beneath in grey; those are capped at $1,000 in Torrance and are already counted in the candidate's Donations, so we never re-add them to the spending figure.
Form 460's "Total Contributions Received" (Summary Line 5) combines monetary contributions, loans, and non-monetary contributions. Some published "total raised" figures add up that line across multiple calendar-year filings. Because an outstanding loan is restated on every filing until it is repaid, summing it across years counts the same borrowed dollars more than once.
We avoid that. We report contributions and loans as separate figures, we count a loan's current balance once (net of repayments), and we never add a carried-over loan to more than one period. As a result our combined contributions-plus-loans figure can read lower than a cumulative "total raised" that double-counts a loan. The same rules apply identically to every candidate in every race.
Loan figures reflect the most recent Form 460 filing; donation totals can run a few days later when 24-hour late-contribution reports (Form 497) have been filed since the last Form 460. The filing dates are shown on each race page.
Maintainers: the field-level mapping (NetFile export columns to Form 460 lines), the reconciliation check, and the load procedure are documented in docs/finance-data-dictionary.md in the repository.
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