Back when she was a lawmaker and chair of the Senate Elections Committee, Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan made it her top priority to hold political campaigns accountable and shine a light on dark money.

APS has made an offer to settle its ongoing dispute with Commissioner Burns: Drop your inquest into our 2014 political spending and we’ll support a commission rule to make sure election spending by any entity (both regulated and unregulated) with business before the commission is disclosed in the future.

As the election comes to a close, campaign finance documents filed with the Arizona Clean Elections Commission and the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office show that, with only one statewide race, outside spending is in state and legislative elections is way down from 2014.

More than 200 independent expenditure committees have filed with the Secretary of State’s Office but not all spend to the same degree. Here are this election’s five biggest spenders.

A dark money group urged the Arizona Court of Appeals to allow it to challenge the Citizens Clean Elections Commission’s authority to levy a $96,000 fine against it after a judge ruled that it missed the deadline for filing an appeal, a case that could settle the long-running dispute over the extent of the commission’s jurisdiction.

Of the $1.9 million spent this cycle by “outside groups” to affect Arizona elections, $565,000 – or about 30 percent – comes with no disclosure of the source of the money.

With just one week until Arizona’s primary election, political spending to affect legislative races paid for by outside groups that don’t disclose the source of the money amounts to almost half a million dollars.

The organizer of a bid to quash a new state law easing rules on anonymous "dark money'' donations in political races has folded his tent.

The Federal Election Commission levied nearly a quarter-million dollars’ worth of fines against three dark money groups for failing to report contributions from an organization run by Sean Noble after the Arizona political operative inadvertently disclosed the alleged violations in a 2014 interview.

A complaint filed with the Internal Revenue Service against a “dark money” group that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in the 2014 governor’s race appears to provide a stark example of the way new campaign finance laws could bar Arizona election officials from punishing a violation, even when it’s right in front of their faces.