The story behind the score

Among the state’s biggest cities, several sprawling Dallas-area suburbs tallied the highest rate of requests to Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott last year to keep government information secret, according to a recent examination by the Center for Public Integrity.

The probe examined the number of attempts by the 20 largest Texas cities to block public requests for information in 2011, then looked at how those numbers stacked up for each city, according to the rate of requests per 100,000 population. The “winners” were not the state’s biggest cities. McKinney had the highest rate of requests asking that Abbott allow the withholding of documents sought by citizens under the Texas Public Information Act. Next up were McAllen, Garland, Mesquite, Plano and Arlington. Fort Worth was ranked eighth and Dallas ninth, giving the Fort Worth/Dallas metroplex seven of the top 10 in the rankings.

State Integrity News for Texas from SII partner KERA:

Texas is one of just six states that select all of its judges in partisan elections.  Critics say that creates conflicts of interest and politics becomes more important than qualifications.  In the third part of “Texas Judges: Out of Order,” we look at the pros and cons of the way Texas selects judges and some alternatives.

Listen to the story from KERA - Dallas.

State Integrity news for Texas from SII partner KERA:

Complaints about Texas judges are usually handled in secret and rarely lead to punishment. That’s what state lawmakers heard when they met to review the Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct, the agency that disciplines judges.

Citizens testified that the agency’s secrecy makes it impossible to know whether Texas’s 3,910 judges are being held accountable. Austin attorney Bennie Ray told lawmakers that even when judges are punished it’s a slap on the wrist in a closed meeting.

“There’s no way for the public or a voter to easily track a judges complain history. Judges could have a number of informal complaints and nobody would know about them,” Ray testified.

Read and hear more from KERA - Dallas.

State Integrity news for Texas from SII partner KERA:

The State Integrity Investigation on government corruption gives Texas an average grade of C for holding judges accountable. But some citizens and lawmakers who’ve tested the system say that grade is far too high.

As part of a series of reports -- "Texas Judges: “Out of Order” -- KERA found that the public can access little information about misconduct complaints against judges. The Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct, the agency that investigates and disciplines judges, is not subject to the Texas Public Information Act.

And even when citizens file complaints about a judge misbehaving in the courtroom, the complaints sometimes cannot be investigated because no record exists of the proceedings in many Texas courts.

Read and hear more from KERA - Dallas.

State Integrity news for Texas from SII partner KUT:

As always, money played a role in deciding the winners in this year's Texas primaries -- money that flows through a system that get low marks from the State Integrity Investigation.

It gave Texas a "D minus" overall on political financing, with the lowest ranking in the part of the study that looked at whether or not state laws are effective at regulating political financing.

The short answer there is “no,” because Texas has no limits on how much money you can give to a candidate.

Read and hear more from KUT - Austin.