Delinquent campaign finance filing – a bipartisan problem

Running for office involves an endless list of to-dos, from filing to run to crafting a message to planning your comms to meeting the voters. But one task is constant: raising money.

And with raising money comes a related task: filing campaign finance reports.

If you are running for any non-federal office in Kentucky, you register with the Kentucky Registry of Election Finance, or KREF for short. Once registered, you file your reports on a fixed schedule, based on the election date: 60 days before the election, 30 days before, 15 days before, 30 days after, and 60 days after. Then, if this was for a primary and you won the primary, you do it all again for the general. And then you have to file an annual report as long as you have money left over in your campaign account.

And yes, it can be a pain. But, as citizens we want our candidates to tell us where they got their money and where they spent it, so we have at least some level of transparency into the process. Most candidates understand that, and they get those reports in on time.

But, some don’t. When they fail to file on time, KREF contacts them with a reminder. If that doesn’t do the job, KREF reaches out again. For most late filers, that push does the trick, and they file the report – late, but filed.

Then there are those who just never file. They go weeks, months, even years, without filing the required reports. And since failing to file a report can generate some pretty good fines, they put themselves at risk.

I started digging into this because I wondered if it was a party-related thing. Were Dems worse than Repubs at filing their reports? And while it is true that a few more Dems than Repubs were late, it’s pretty much a bi-partisan problem.

So, here are two lists:

• A list of all candidates who have one or more delinquent KREF reports.
• A table showing ALL the reports that are late, along with district, election, type of report, and how many days late the report was at the time the table was created.

All of this comes from a publicly-available file on the KREF web site.

Candidates with at least one delinquent campaign finance report

Delinquent reports by candidate

Note that the table is sortable by clicking on a column header. To reset it to its original sort, just refresh the page.