By Adam Pagnucco.
It’s time to start breaking down fundraising in key races since the January campaign finance reports are now in. For candidates in traditional financing (which includes some county candidates and all state candidates), the next time we will see a finance report is April 21. Candidates in public financing will periodically submit reports when they apply for public matching funds, so we may see some earlier data for them. This series will start by looking at the county executive race.
Let’s begin with the elephant in the room: the difficulties created by the recent overhaul of the State Board of Elections (SBE) campaign finance website.
As I have previously written, I heard a string of complaints from candidates struggling to file on the eve of the January 21 deadline. No one wanted to go on the record for fear of offending SBE, but here is what Council Member Will Jawando (who is running for executive) told the Banner:
Jawando said he encountered technical issues with the state elections board website this week, so the numbers his campaign was required to submit by Wednesday’s filing deadline could not be checked against those it provided to The Banner…
Jawando’s campaign provided The Banner emails it exchanged with state campaign finance officials about how the website would not accept his filing. A spokesperson for the state elections board did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Jawando’s story is the tip of the iceberg. I won’t go into the details of what candidates told me because I won’t betray their confidences, but believe this: I have never seen or heard of this much difficulty in filing reports. (Disclosure: I was once a campaign treasurer.)
I think some of these issues have now been cleaned up but a few remain. First, the state’s prior campaign finance website contained data going back to 2005. Now it begins with the 2019-2022 cycle. POOF! Fourteen years of data have been erased. I have asked them to restore it but I don’t know if that will ever happen.
Second, numbers on the committee summary, summary sheet and itemized downloads sometimes don’t match. Let’s use the account of Council Member Andrew Friedson (who is also running for executive) as an example. On his committee summary, his cycle contributions are reported as $1,649,057 and his cycle expenditures are reported as $ $311,495. See the screenshot below.
On his summary sheet, his cycle contributions are reported as $2,144,424 and his cycle expenditures are reported as $390,476. Again, see the screenshot below.
According to the spreadsheet downloads of records, his cycle contributions are $1,661,617 and his cycle expenditures are $311,495. (He also received a $10,000 loan from his wife.)
These numbers should all match. They don’t. That concerns me.
Based on calculating the changes between beginning bank balance, receipts, expenditures and ending bank balance, I believe the spreadsheets contain the most accurate data. That’s why I am going to rely on them – a VERY time consuming process. That goes to another concern that I have: the mainstream press is not going to comb through thousands of records to audit their accuracy. I saw evidence of that when the Banner reported Friedson as receiving more than $2 million in receipts for the cycle, a number that appeared on his summary sheet but is larger than his actual contribution records as downloadable from the state.
Once again, I’m not blaming Friedson, Jawando, the Banner or any candidates or press outlets. These are data reporting issues that must be cleaned up by SBE.
The information you will see in this series comes from spreadsheet downloads of contributions and expenditures for three executive candidates: Jawando, Friedson and Council Member Evan Glass. (Mithun Banerjee filed an affidavit claiming that he had less than $1,000 in contributions and expenditures since he started his account. Republican Shelly Skolnick gave himself one $1,000 contribution.) Given the problems that I see in the data, I won’t vouch for every penny in it. But I will say this: this is the best shot I can take at understanding what’s going on in this race.
We will describe the systems in which the candidates are raising money next.