If we can’t have a state ethics commission to review campaign finance reports, can we at least have a math function in the reporting software?
While reviewing Representative-Elect Sue Peterson’s (R-13/Sioux Falls) pre-general campaign finance report, I noticed her income, expenditures, and cash on hand don’t match up:
Raised $21,858.34, spent $13,475.72—as of October 28, Peterson’s campaign fund should have had $8,382.62 on hand. Yet Peterson, who started with no cash on hand following her selection by her local party leaders to replace Steve Westra on the ballot in August, reported $15,282.62 on hand, $6,900 more than arithmetic indicates.
$6,900? That’s a nice round figure. I go flipping through the rest of the report, looking for the number Sue’s treasurer Trent Swanson forgot to carry through, but I find no non-ideological errors: expenses add up, income adds up, itemized contributions are on another sheet, no in-state PAC money—
Wait a minute: a well-connected Sioux Falls Republican with no in-state PAC money?
Peterson got money from BNSF’s RAILPAC, along with dozens of her fellow Legislative candidates. How did she get no love from our in-state PACs?
I check Peterson’s pre-general supporting documentation, which she cites for her itemized individual contributions but not her PACs and find her list of twenty loving in-state PACs:
Total: $6,900. Swanson reported it; he just failed to cite those donations on the pre-general report itself.
There’s no crime here, but from a reporting perspective, that omission leaves reporters and other interested parties who are visually scanning hundreds of non-searchable campaign finance reports (some of them still scanned, handwritten documents) for totals and patterns in donor activity likely to miss Peterson’s in-state PAC support. That omission would be easy to catch with a simple check coded into the reporting form: IF COHold + Inc – Exp <> COHnew, THEN (OUTPUT “You screwed up! Try again!“, TRY AGAIN), plus a simple amendment to campaign finance law requiring every treasurer to report every dollar in online format for the campaign finance database, the way Initiated Measure 22 did of committees raising more than $1,000 (see Section 28).
Maybe we don’t need to “grow government” (the Kristi Noem spin blog’s latest way to attack Marty Jackley and Shantel Krebs for agreeing that South Dakota could use an ethics commission), but we could stand to grow our campaign finance reporting website code by two lines.
Hear, hear Mr. Heidelberger. Democrats do NOT need or want to grow government. Say it a hundred thousand times and refute the Pat Powers of the state who try to brand us as that. We want to make government a little smaller and a whole lot more efficient and honest.
You’re right, Porter: my goal is not to make government bigger. My goal is the opposite of Trump’s which appears to be the rich man’s selfish and sadistic desire to appoint incompetents and tear government apart. My goal is to make government serve its purposes so that we all can live better than we would in anarchy.
The two little lines of code I propose are a perfect example. Whether we have a state ethics commission, campaign finance cops, or just Rachel Schmidt and Jason Williams sending stern e-mails, monitoring and enforcement of campaign finance rules would be much more efficient if the online entry form included an error checker that would flag any obvious arithmetic error.