New York State’s long-discussed, long-planned public campaign finance program is finally in full effect, but as the November elections approach, it appears the program is still a work in progress.
This new $100 million system for matching private political contributions with taxpayer dollars has reportedly benefited 316 candidates running in 213 state legislative races. Its lofty goal is to reduce the influence of wealthy donors and encourage contributions as small as $250 from individuals. But there are already warning signs that the system could be open to abuse.
Recent news accounts said some of the roughly $163,000 in taxpayer funds that went to Assembly candidate Dao Yin of Queens relied on private cash donations filed without any way to verify or contact donors. So the state issued an order requiring a candidate to provide the phone number or email address of each donor in order to receive the requested matching funds. In Yin’s case, the primary candidate provided only a letter saying his campaign had tried “in good faith” to obtain the missing information from donors but had failed. He has denied wrongdoing and authorities are conducting an audit.
Election officials rightly declared that such disclosures would no longer be distorted in “good faith.” But the fact that they had to change the rules so soon after the program was in full swing shows that they were showing too much “good faith” to eager politicians.
By contrast, the independent New York City Campaign Finance Board, established in the late 1990s, has been a successful model. It has striven for accounting and auditing, sometimes to the chagrin of senior city politicians.
But as created by the state Legislature in more recent years, the state’s Public Campaign Finance Board is part of the state elections board, a bipartisan body that has become notorious for lax enforcement of disclosure rules when left to its own devices over the decades. The June 25 primary marked a first for the PCFB. But it is not the first of its kind. Across the country, deliberately misrepresenting the true source of campaign money has been commonplace, and has caused problems for certain candidates and campaign aides.
So-called “fake donor” schemes — where a middleman donates money to a politician from an undisclosed source — have become so common that they’ve become almost a cliché. Current investigations are underway from New York City to Oakland, California. Even the federal case of former Rep. George Santos has a fake donation element. He allegedly faked the totals of his private contributions to get more money from a national Republican Party program.
More importantly in Albany, public funds are at stake and officials must take a cautious stance to protect the public trust and ensure the success of the funding program.
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