A bizarre KREF report

If you have read ForwardKY for a while, you know that I am something of a data geek. I actually enjoy working with spreadsheets, slicing and dicing the numbers to see facts, trends, and questions.

As such, I enjoy digging into reports from the Kentucky Registry of Election Finance, commonly referred to as KREF. You can look up a candidate, committee, or donor, then pull down the data and put it into a spreadsheet for further analysis.

A friend asked me recently if I had looked at the reports for Mitra Subedi, one of the candidates in the Democratic primary for district 30 in the Kentucky House. Subedi was challenging the incumbent, Daniel Grossberg. (Subedi wound up losing by about 50 votes out of 3,200 cast.)

I had not looked at this particular set of reports, so I decided to see what was up. And when I opened the first report, I was somewhat gobsmacked. Let me tell you why.

The basics

One of the first things you learn when you are doing campaign finance work in Kentucky is that you have to get not only the name and address of the donor, but also their occupation and employer. It’s a pain, but it’s required, so you do it. And if you don’t have it, you contact the donor and get it.

Over his two pre-primary reports (30-day-prior and 15-day-prior), Subedi had 90 itemized donations. And, out of the resulting 180 slots for Occupation and Employer, there were 130 marked “unknown.”

In the past, I’ve seen a few “unknown” entries on reports. And KREF might overlook a few, if the rest of the report was complete. But to have 72% of your entries break the rules? That’s going to get you in trouble.

On top of that, many of the entries that actually had an occupation or employer listed were matched up with an “unknown” – which makes no sense. If you got the employer, why wouldn’t you get the occupation? And vice versa?

Really bizarre.

Digging deeper

Once you get past the plethora of “unknown” entries, there are some other things that give you pause. Note that I’m not saying any of the below items were necessarily illegal or out of bounds. They just raised some suspicions.

For example, the cash donations. Campaigns are allowed to take cash donations of $100 or less, and don’t have to itemize them. (You’re supposed to keep track of who gave them, though, in case that person gives you more in the future and goes over the $100 limit.)

Subedi had 15 cash donations. All of them came in on two days, April 2 and April 10. Normally, you would think there was a big fund-raiser event on those days, and the cash donations were part of that. But there are no other donations on those days – just the cash ones.

And, all but two of the cash donations are between $90 and $100, with four on the 10th being the max allowed. Did all these people just show up at the campaign headquarters on the same day with $100 bills?

Then there’s the possibility of “straw man” donations. These are when one person wants to give more than the max allowed ($2,100 per election), so they donate in another person’s name. Or, they give that other person the money to donate.

One donation of $2,051 came from a cashier at Walmart. Another for $2,000 came from a cashier at good old “unknown.” And another $2,000 check came from a driver for Amazon.

Could all of these people have made these donations out of their own money? Sure. But, these entries (and others) do raise some questions.

In conclusion

I have direct experience with KREF staff, since I ran for office in 2014. My first report (on paper, back then) was returned with some mistakes noted. When I called, the person on the other end graciously and patiently walked me through the report, explaining what I had done wrong.

Since then, I have heard similar stories from other candidates and campaign treasurers. KREF folks want you to get it right, so they can approve your report and get on to the next one. The next-to-last thing they want to have to do is flag your campaign as out of compliance. And the very, very last thing they want to do is refer you, the candidate, to the Attorney General’s office for criminal prosecution.

Because these reporting rules are not just nice-to-haves. They are in statute, which means they are laws, which means you can get in serious trouble if you ignore them. The minimum fine that KREF can charge is $500, but fines in the tens of thousands of dollars are possible. And if you are referred to the AG’s office, you could be looking at even more serious consequences.

Am I saying Mitra Subedi is in that much trouble? Not at all. The KREF folks may work with him to get everything cleared up, especially since he’s a first-time candidate.

But it’s not like the Subedi campaign had hundreds of donations to keep track of. (I had many more donations when I ran for Metro Council.) Whomever was doing campaign finance reporting for him just really, really messed up. And I suspect the consequences may linger. We shall see.

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I have copied the pertinent columns from Subedi’s two reports into the table below, removing the names and other identifying information. The table is sortable by clicking on a column header. To put it back to its original state, just refresh the page.