The other day, I was on the FEC website looking at some of the campaign finance reports. Sometimes, the FEC will note errors or discrepancies in the campaign finance reports and requests that the campaign respond to them. The letters exchanged back and forth between the Commission and a campaign are all visible online.
Most of the time, the letters are boring. Small math errors in totals or notices from the campaign about joint fundraising committees or corrections about campaign debts. That sort of stuff.
But then there’s these exchanges between the FEC and Todd Young’s campaign for Congress. I don’t know what to make of them.
First, the campaign failed to designate a bank where it was going to deposit its money (as required by FEC rules). Early starting jitters, I guess. The campaign amended its report.
But the amendment didn’t include required information about what kind of office the candidate was running for in the amended report, and that prompted another angry letter from the FEC. Apparently, the campaign forgot to mention the name of the candidate or the candidate’s political party on the form. That’s kind of weird, but it was fixed by another amendment.
Smooth sailing, right?
But then comes the strange stuff. Then the campaign got another letter because it wasn’t provide campaign finance reporting information on many of its donors (name, address, occupation, etc) on its Q2 report.
I thought that was odd. It’s always important to keep track of donors for any campaign. Not just because of the rules, but because you might want to be able to ask them for more money later.
The campaign responded, saying that it was doing its best to get the required information (its response was due on October 2, but was stamped as being received by the FEC on October 5, strangely). The campaign also said that it had “redoubled” its efforts and was “implementing more stringent processes for our donor information collection.” Everything’s cool. No worries.
Only they submitted their response by mail and not electronically as required and got another letter from the FEC about that. No big; learning curve strikes again.
But then the FEC wasn’t satisfied with the Young campaign’s procedures and there was another letter. This time, the FEC was concerned about several things in the campaign’s Q3 report.
One was tracking totals from donors that gave more than once. Another problem was that the FEC found that “redoubled efforts” and new “more stringent processes” weren’t enough. The FEC also noted that the problems with incomplete information seen in the Q2 report continued in the Q3 report. The FEC letter also said that the campaign wasn’t providing complete information (descriptions and addresses) for money the campaign was spending.
As if that wasn’t enough, the campaign got yet another letter from the FEC saying that its earlier efforts to fix problems with the Q3 report were insufficient when it came to tracking totals for repeat donors.
I know what you’re thinking. That’s all pretty boring, and you’re probably right. But it’s weird. You don’t see similar letter exchanges between the FEC and any of the other 9th District campaigns over campaign finance problems. The 5th District campaigns are squeaky clean by comparison. You don’t see them anywhere else that I can find.
And when it came to the missing information on donors, I figured it was probably just a couple of blanks. I went and looked in the reports, and there were lots of them. LOTS.
In the Q3 report alone, a quick count found 29 donors that had no address info at all, out of about 120 donors total. That’s a fourth of the donors. I threw the report into Excel and with a couple of quick formulas, I found that 34% of Young’s Q3 donors didn’t have address info.
And that doesn’t include the ones where they didn’t list the required occupation information. There are even more of those.
I’m not an expert on campaign finance law, so maybe some expert can tell me. Is this normal? It doesn’t look normal to me compared to other campaigns in Indiana.
I understand not having info on every single donor. But there are lots of them. The occasional mistake is one thing. Everybody makes mistakes.
But a third of your donors (a third of your money) lacking addresses, let alone other required info?
Is this normal?
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Todd's struck me as a pretty bright guy. This does seem out-of-character. Sometimes the candidate doesn't know what the campaign staff is doing, but these are pretty basic matters for anyone who's done an FEC report.