Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis paid campaign strategists working on hidden subcontracts, approved rushed payments under misleading pretenses, and took millions of dollars from reserves, as he waged a taxpayer-funded advertising war last fall against two citizen-led constitutional amendments that would have protected abortion rights and legalized marijuana in Florida.

The details of DeSantis’ unprecedented public advertising campaign — in which the Republican governor filled the state’s airwaves with so-called “public service announcements” attacking a pair of petition drives supported by millions of Floridians — are contained in hundreds pages of emails, invoices, transaction logs, and other documents obtained by Seeking Rents through a series of public records requests.

The paper trail is still nowhere near complete: Almost a year later, the Governors’ Office is still withholding many key records related to the advertising campaigns against Amendment 3, which would have permitted Floridians to use marijuana for recreation, and Amendment 4, which would have overturned a statewide abortion ban. Both measures won majority support from Florida voters — 56 percent for marijuana, 57 percent for abortion — but fell short of the 60 percent supermajority needed to amend the state constitution.

Immediately after the election, Seeking Rents requested records from the five state agencies DeSantis used to sponsor ads: The Agency for Health Care Administration, the Department of Children & Families, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and the Department of Transportation. To date, just two — AHCA and FDOT — have produced records in response, and they only did so last month.

But even the fragments released so far suggest that DeSantis ultimately burned through far more taxpayer cash fighting the abortion and ballot measures than was publicly known at the time.