The controversy over the Internal Revenue Service's handling of applications for non-profit status from Tea Party groups has put a spotlight on a subject with which we at the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group are all too painfully familiar: The migraine-producing complexity of the nation's campaign finance system. To shed some light on the ongoing debate, we've decided to share what we know.
As often is the case with systems worthy of Rube Goldberg, it's easier to draw than to describe.
As many as 600 individuals appear to have exceeded the $117,000 that they were legally allowed to give directly to federal candidates, political parties and political committees in the last election cycle, records examined by the Sunlight Foundation suggest. But our most troubling finding may how difficult it is determine with legal certainty exactly how many campaign scofflaws there are, or how much over the limit they gave.
Like our former Sunlight colleagues, Paul Blumenthal and Aaron Bycoffe of the Huffington Post, we have been curious about the number of donors who appear to have exceeded campaign spending limits, in an era when the Supreme Court has made it possible for wealthy individuals to give in unlimited amounts via super PACs.
In addition to those who violated the overall limit for giving to federal campaigns, we identified as many as 1,478 individuals who may have given more than the legal limit of $70,800 to parties and committees and 507 who appear to have given more than the $46,200 legal aggregate limit to individual candidates.
A story which had been making the rounds in broadcast trade publications, broke into the mainstream media Thursday, when NPR reported that scammers have been taking advantage of the Federal Communications Commission's online political ad file to rip off political consultants.
Hold the no-honor-among-thieves jokes. Let's just stipulate that stealing is not a good thing, even if the victims are political consultants. More worrisome than what the latest developments on the FCC database mean for advertisers' information is what they could mean for yours.
Recent reporting and analysis by ProPublica and the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group have brought a certain dark money group, the Government Integrity Fund, into the light.
The Government Integrity Fund is registered as a 501(c)4, a type of nonprofit permitted to run issue ads to influence the outcome of elections without disclosing the names its donors to the Federal Election Commission.
Thanks to a long-anticipated ruling by the Federal Communications Commission in August, broadcast stations are now required to make information about political ad buys available online. That FCC decision, along with efforts by the Sunlight Foundation’s Political Ad Sleuth and ProPublica’s Free the Files projects to aggregate the more than 30,000 filings on the FCC database so far, have helped to shed more light on the money these groups are spending and the people and interest groups behind the influence.
In light of the first presidential debate held last Wednesday at the University of Denver, an article by USA Today reported that the Romney and Obama campaigns along with their supporters have dropped nearly $700 million on TV ads in Denver with a little over a month to go until Election Day. With more than 26,000 ads airing in Denver so far this election cycle, commercial breaks on TV stations like the NBC affiliate KUSA have been flooded by political ads with as many as 93 ads from the two campaigns and the super PACs supporting them running in the course of a day.
Following the political ad campaign finance trail and compiling statistics like the ones cited in the USA Today piece, however, was previously a nearly impossible feat for reporters as broadcast stations were not required to publicly disclose their political ad revenue files until recently. In April, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed a landmark rule that now requires broadcast stations to post their political ad revenue files online so that political ad spending can be tracked in real-time. The passage of this rule marks a new era of transparency in campaign finance disclosure, as formerly political ad files were only available in paper, most often inaccessibly warehoused in file cabinets at individual TV stations. In this particular USA Today article, however, it is important to note that the reporters compiled more nuanced data--ranging from the specific time slots in which ads aired to the breakdown of viewer demographics--than what is currently available from the FCC website.
The system, however, still has limitations with only the top four TV networks’ affiliates (ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC) in the top 50 media markets required to comply in the first two years. Additionally, broadcasters are not obligated to disclose campaign ad revenue data prior to when the rule went into effect on August 2nd nor are they required to post their data in a standardized format, which severely limits the accessibility and searchability of the FCC’s database. This is why organizations like the Sunlight Foundation and Free Press are partnering to roll out Political Ad Sleuth, an app that will capture a more complete and user-friendly depiction of political ad spending in key swing states like Colorado, where political ads are dominating the airwaves in a vie for votes.
"The News Without Transparency" shows you what the news would look like without public access to information. Laws and regulations that force the government to make the data it has publicly available are absolutely vital, along with services that take that raw data and make it easy for reporters to write sentences like the ones we've redacted in the piece above. View the entire series here! If you have an article you'd like us to put through the redaction machine, please send us an email at rsibley@sunlightfoundation.com.
Last month Politico reported that corporate contributions to a super PAC set
up to support Democratic U.S. Rep. Howard Berman were being used as a weapon against him during the contentious primary race that he and Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman, also from California, have found themselves in as a result of redistricting.
The Politico article is able to report facts regarding campaign finance data by accessing publicly available information. The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 initially established substantive disclosure requirements for federal candidates, political parties, and PACs. Subsequent amendments and legislation, including the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 and the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 have further strengthened these requirements.
As I have written about before, this information can be found on the Federal Election Commission’s website under Campaign Finance Reports and Data, but it’s not easy to use unless you know what you are looking for. However, because the information is made available to the public, organizations like the Sunlight Foundation, ProPublica and the New York Times have been able to take FEC data and put it in more user-friendly formats. The information is then presented so that the most relevant information is easily accessible to regular people.
"The News Without Transparency" shows you what the news would look like without public access to information. Laws and regulations that force the government to make the data it has publicly available are absolutely vital, along with services that take that raw data and make it easy for reporters to write sentences like the ones we've redacted in the piece above. If you have an article you'd like us to put through the redaction machine, please send us an email at mbuck@sunlightfoundation.com.
The day of gadget envy reckoning is upon us as Apple unveils their latest iPad and it seems only natural that the Sunlight Foundation watch this media frenzy in regards to our policy proposals. One particularly confounding (and floundering) situation is that the Senate refuses to use the internet and file their campaign finance reports electronically, though a few Senate offices nobly do.
The current process of filing goes something like this: a senator's campaign staff fills out campaign financial disclosure forms as required every quarter, submits those forms to the Secretary of the Senate who prints them out and sends it over to the Federal Election Commission. The FEC then takes this pile of paper and pays an army of data-entry folks to put those forms back into electronic format and then the FEC posts it online. We might be laughing at this scene set to Yakety Sax if it weren't costing taxpayers an estimated $430,000 every single year! This is stupid.
We tried appealing to their environmental concerns. We tried appealing to their government efficiency concerns. We tried appealing to their debt concerns. Turns out those concerns aren't so strong. Now, we appeal to their gadget envy concerns.
The iPad Proposal:
Maybe this will bait McConnell out from his cave of baffling obstruction?
Note: This proposal is tongue-in-cheek and we think it's much better for senators to just use their existing computers to file, like the House has been doing for years. Maybe they could put the money they would save towards funding other e-government programs?!
Of the 12 members of the failed supercommittee that were tasked with cutting $1.2 trillion from the federal deficit, five have disclosed records with the Federal Election Commission stating that they’ve received bundled contributions from lobbyists exceeding $16,000.
Representative Dave Camp, R-Mich, is the only member of the committee that has reported receiving bundled contributions so far this cycle. All $32,000 he received was bundled by one lobbyist named Harry Sporidis. Sporidis works for the firm Polsinelli Shughart and represents a number of clients in the healthcare industry, including the National Association for Behavioral Health and the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
According to the records, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash, has been the greatest supercommittee recipient of bundled contributions since 2009. She’s received just over $262,000 from large corporations including AT&T, Microsoft, Boeing, and Amazon, and well-known lobbyists like Tony Podesta who represents many prominent clients like BP America, Credit Suisse and Boeing.
This information has been made available as a result of the Honest Leadership and Government Act of 2007, which amended the Lobbyist Disclosure Act of 1995. The act made gifts to lawmakers illegal, was supposed to close the revolving door and required more disclosure regarding lobbying activity and spending – including the disclosure of bundled contributions, among other things. The act came about after Jack Abramoff, the infamous lobbyist turned felon, was convicted of fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy. His case demonstrated the wide-ranging corrupt practices that could take place in Washington.
The rules require disclosure of bundled contributions went into effect in 2009, and have so far generated a rather small dataset of just over 300 records but have revealed $17.1 million in contributions to just 76 recipients including party committees. The largest bundler, the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), has given $2,120,952 in bundled contributions to just two recipients. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is one of them and received the bulk of that money: $2,072,950. The Republican Senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, received the remaining $48,000 of that money. According to records filed with the Senate Office of Public Records, EEI has lobbied on a variety of issues related to energy, including regulating greenhouse gases and Clean Air Act regulations.
The remaining supercommittee members that received bundled contributions subject to the relatively new rules are Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, Chris Van Hollen, R-Md, and John Kerry, D-Mass,. The three received $235,500, $40,000 and $20,425 respectively.
The lobbyist bundler data is now available on InfluenceExplorer.com and TransparencyData.com. The data comes directly from the FEC. Contributions are disclosed by recipients (reporting committees) to the FEC when a lobbyist/registrant or lobbyist/registrant PAC makes at least two contributions to a single recipient totaling at least $16,200. Recipients report according to their regularly scheduled reporting periods and according to biannual reporting requirements put into place just for bundled contributions, according to the FEC.
The 2012 campaign fundraising totals, covering January through June, proved record in some cases, with the total amount raised by candidates running for Senate being the highest amount ever reported for that time period in a non-election year at $103.1 million, according to an analysis done by the Federal Election Commission released yesterday.
The FEC’s release also highlighted a 15 percent increase in fundraising by candidates running for House seats in 2012. The total raised by candidates for the House was $182.1 million from January 1 through June 30, 2011. The total for that same time period in 2009 was $132 million. The total amount raised by all 2012 political candidates for the first half of the year is $285.2 million.
Comparing the data released by the FEC for the House to data released in 2009 shows some significant increases in funding for individual incumbent candidates as well. For instance, the first six months of 2011 House Speaker John Boehner proved fruitful as he brought in $6.4 million. During the same time period in 2009, the amount raised by his campaign was much smaller at just over $1 million.
Majority Leader Eric Cantor has also had an increase in fundraising this year compared to 2009, but it was not nearly as monumental as Boehner’s. Cantor raised $2.6 million in the first six months of this year, about $900,000 more than the same time period in 2009.
The FEC highlighted some significant increases in specific types of campaign fundraising as well. House freshmen incumbents – many originally running on the Tea Party platform -- reported raising $32 million through June 30 of this year, 34 percent more than the $9.5 million reported in 2009. The analysis also showed that contributions from individuals to House candidates increased by 21 percent, while contributions from political action committees (PACs) to House candidates increased by just three percent.
Go to the Sunlight Foundation’s Influence Explorer to see some of the data analyzed by the FEC yourself. The FEC’s original press release can be found here.
When the Citizens United ruling came down last year I spent a great deal of time explaining the specifics of how corporations could spend money in elections to friends, family, and on the radio and television. The biggest confusion that a lot of people had was whether corporations could, in the wake of the ruling, contribute directly to the campaign of a political candidate. The answer was easy: no.
According to the Washington Post, the Republican members of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) want to change that. These three members released a document stating that corporations should be able to contribute directly to the campaigns of federal office seekers. The document states that the prohibition on these direct donations are "at best suspect," in light of the Citizens United ruling.
It is not clear where, exactly, these FEC commissioners see an inference towards the elimination of the ban on direct corporate contributions to candidates in the Supreme Court's ruling. The ruling assails the Austin ruling's finding of an anti-distortion reasoning for banning corporate independent expenditures, but repeats the Buckley finding that direct contributions to candidates can be banned and limited due to an anti-corruption concern, whether real or just an appearance of. The only time the Citizens United ruling swipes at anti-corruption concerns is to state that they do not apply to independent expenditures.
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