From Eric Dondero:

One brave Democrat Assemblyman voted against the recently-enacted spend-happy California budget. His name is Rep. Anthony Portantino, and he has the reputation for being rather frugal: Not changing the carpet in his office to save bucks on his allowance, turning down the car allowances and for cell phones reimbursement.

But for his Nay vote, the Democratic leadership decided to punish him. They released numbers showing his office spent more for staff and expenses than any other in the Assembly. Problem was, the numbers were cooked.

Enter the Libertarian Math Geeks. Portantino asked a group of Stanford students to go through the office allotment budgets of all Assemblymen. Surprise! When all the hidden costs were factored in he ended up right in the middle at 37th.

From the San Jose Mercury News "How a Stanford group shook a sacred cow in Sacramento":

As a matter of course, Stanford students pay scant heed to the strange events unfolding in Sacramento. Unlike their cousins at UC Berkeley, they don't depend on the state budget.

That happy neglect ended this summer when a group of mathematically talented students from a libertarian-leaning group got involved with an assemblyman from Pasadena.

Portantino's chief of staff, Trent Hager, called a group of Stanford students who had volunteered to help under the rubric of California Common Sense (www.cacs.org).

By 4:30 p.m. that Friday, the politically minded Stanford group had picked up the accusatory numbers -- originally on paper, though later put on the Web -- and began comparing them with payroll data.

Their analysis revealed that Portantino was only the 18th-highest spender on personal staff. Because many salaries are hidden under nondescript categories like committees or overhead, the Stanford group judged his real total of expenses was 37th, about in the middle of the 80-member Assembly.

The Stanford students had exposed mathematically the Assembly's dirty little secret: Legislators spend far more than the $263,000 allocated to each office for staff. And leaders spend more than rank-and-file legislators like Portantino.

Later in the piece, the Geeks are quoted:

Nothing we do is particularly complicated,'' says Dakin Sloss, a Stanford math major who is president of California Common Sense. "We're using basic common-sense technologies to get this information out there.''

Sacramento Democrats argue that the kids from Stanford are aligned with a group with its own agenda. The founder of California Common Sense is Joe Lonsdale, a member of the often libertarian-leaning Paypal Mafia. (In fact, http://www.cacs.org is a sophisticated site that takes a critical view of government.)

To support California Math Geeks California Common Sense.