Sifting 19,150 Donations : Reporters logged 14 years of contributions to county supervisorial candidates, then winnowed the data to eliminate repetitions and inaccuracies. Next, they began to search for spending patterns.

Over the past 14 years, a wide range of contributors, from the Tobacco Institute to Disneyland to the Lettuce Amuse U Comedy School Inc., have given $8,791,204 to the candidates for the Orange County Board of Supervisors.

We know because we counted every contribution--all 19,150.

Last December, a team of Times reporters began with a 4-foot-tall stack of official contribution reports and developed a comprehensive, computerized information bank to bring context to the campaign money that has swirled around the county’s five most powerful public officials and their predecessors.

The Times searched for long-term spending patterns to measure any influence that major contributors might have had over officials who must win election every four years to retain their posts, which now pay $82,054 a year.

The 14-year period was selected to ensure that the investigation predated passage in 1978 of the county’s landmark campaign reform ordinance known as TINCUP, which sought to limit the influence of such major contributors.

The Times’ specific focus for this series of stories was on political action committees, which were left unregulated by the ordinance. The Times investigation found that PACs have contributed $821,532 to candidates for the board, 9.3% of the total. Annual donations have increased from $13,800 in 1977 to $94,489 last year. To analyze patterns in the contributions, the data was run on an IBM Model 30 computer using Q & A software.

The project began with two large boxes containing copies of every campaign contribution report filed with the Orange County registrar of voters by every supervisor and supervisorial candidate. A typist working under the supervision of Richard O’Reilly, The Times’ director of computer analysis, entered the information into a database--19,150 entries representing more than 6 million clicks of the keyboard.

Then reporters--working from computer-generated reports, including a foot-thick alphabetical paper printout of every contributor--flagged typographical errors, removed more than 2,000 duplicate entries and added a nearly equal number of overlooked contributions.

The material was checked against other government records, including the registrar of voters’ major campaign contributor list and the state’s list of political action committees.

Some PACs--such as the Tobacco Institute, PHB Engineering Inc. of Pasadena and Honopac--at first eluded detection by the computer because their names and other information on campaign forms did not clearly indicate that they were political action committees.

PACs range from employee groups, such as the Orange County Employees’ Assn., to trade organizations, such as the Building Industry Assn. They can be political fund-raising arms of private companies, such as the William Lyon Co. PAC, or public utilities, such as the State and Local Citizenship Responsibility Group of Southern California Edison Co.

The Times found dozens of cases, representing tens of thousands of dollars, in which the same contributor was identified as a PAC on some forms but not on others.

Although many of these unlabeled contributors probably really are PACs, reporters chose not to identify them that way in the database. This may understate the amount of PAC money, but it avoids erroneously identifying any donors as political action committees.

In some cases, decisions regarding precisely which contributions to include varied by candidate. Contributions to Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder’s 1988 congressional campaign, for instance, were excluded because the district attorney’s office ruled that TINCUP, the county campaign ordinance, did not apply to those donations. But money given to Supervisor Bruce Nestande’s 1986 secretary of state campaign were included because a Superior Court judge ruled that TINCUP did govern those.

In the case of Supervisor Don R. Roth, contributions beginning in the second half of 1985--when, as mayor of Anaheim he declared his candidacy for the county board--were added to his totals for 1986 and beyond.

Hundreds of duplicate entries in the data were then weeded out.

For example, when Roth filed several amended reports in 1988 to make corrections on how he had spent his money, the amended records also contained the contributions he had previously reported when he received them two years earlier.

Thousands of other entries were edited for uniformity.

Computer notations were made for contributors listed by a variety of names, such as the State and Local Citizenship Responsibility Group, which also showed up as Group of the Employees of SCE and SCE Citizen Responsibility Group of Employees.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle was the bookkeeping methods used by some candidates to report campaign loans.

For example, James Beam, who ran unsuccessfully for the Board of Supervisors in 1986, had a habit of reporting some loans more than once.

Typically, Beam first reported the money as a “pledge” when it was promised. When the money was received, it was reported again as a loan. If the loan was later forgiven--a common political practice--money would be listed yet again, both as a forgiven loan and also as a campaign contribution.

Beam’s conscientious effort to document all transactions resulted in many loans being entered four or five times on forms spanning different time periods. This greatly inflated the size of campaign war chests while erroneously exaggerating some contributors’ financial support. The redundant entries were deleted.

Money also came from organizations located outside the county that were not always obviously affiliated with Orange County groups. For instance, thousands of dollars flowed to Orange County supervisorial candidates from Los Angeles County Firefighters Local 1014 in South Gate in Los Angeles County. In fact, Orange County firefighters are represented by Local 1014, a bit of information that was not apparent to the computer. The database was edited to show the relationship.

This continual re-evaluation not only disclosed significant new findings, but ultimately strengthened the conclusions that could be drawn from the data.