The Boston Globe’s Joan Vennochi has a must-read column today, Voters deserve guidance on campaign finance allegations: The Office of Campaign and Political Finance deliberately puts off reaching any resolution regarding specific complaints until after an election takes place. That needs to change. Ms. Vennochi is right: OCPF needs to act when it can inform voters, not after allowing voters to be duped until after they cast their ballots.
Ms. Vennochi noted that OCPF responds that it is barred by statute from referring a case to the Attorney General in the 120 days before voting. But it is not barred from investigating and pursuing lesser remedies in its arsenal, such as public resolution letters (where no or inadvertent or minor infractions are found) or disposition agreements (a written agreement “in which the subject agrees to take certain specific actions”)
OCPF seems to be following a prudential rule to not take any action during an election in order to avoid being “used” by either campaign and possibly effect the outcome. That may have been an acceptable goal once, but the magnitude and effect of our billionaire driven SuperPAC politics now demands that the voters have as much accurate information as possible. (Trigger warning: I am quoted to this effect in Ms. Vennochi’s column).
Yes, campaigns will be tempted to hurl charges at each other. The press and voters are perfectly capable of sorting that out just as they scrutinize other charges.
In the Boston mayor’s race there is a political consultant named Technicolor Political that works for both the Kraft Committee and the Kraft supporting SuperPAC, Your City Your Future. Through July Technicolor Political has pulled in over $1.5 million from the Kraft Committee and just under $2 million from the SuperPAC. The Kraft committee raised just under $3.3 million, $2 million of that from Josh Kraft himself. Your City Your Future took in just less than $3.6 million. So about $6.9 million across the two “Independent” committees and Technicolor Political was paid about half of that.
OCPF regulations bar coordination between the committees, but the presumption of coordination is rebuttable if there is a written “firewall” between staff serving the candidate committee and staff serving the IEPAC. In the case of Technicolor Political its website lists no staff, just three partners. I assume the partners all have an equity position so how do you firewall that?
OCPF should consider an outright prohibition on a vendor working for the candidate’s committee and any supporting SuperPAC.
You may recall that grassroots Boston Democrats filed a complaint on June 3 with OCPF asking it to investigate two different “independent” vendors promoting Kraft which claim to be protected by a gossamer firewall. That appears to be a less complicated case. No action has been forthcoming from OCPF.
Now if the consultant is simply a way of coordinating outside the four walls of the candidate HQ and the SuperPAC, does that subject the consultant to remedies and penalties, and what would those look like? Disgorgement of funds? Fines? Banned from state? (Families for Excellent Schools was barred for its violations in 2016). Referral to AG? Unchartered territory but look at those numbers above. The money incentives are out of sight.
OCPF needs to act now. Boston’s voters deserve to know what the money landscape looks like before they vote.
Money Never Sleeps. Follow the Money.
“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” – Louis Brandeis
[Full disclosure: as a (now retired) educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, democracy, and oligarchy.]