North Carolina has major issues with accurately representing the money spent on our elections. On paper, our system requires any committee involved in our elections to file with the State Board of Elections (SBE), submit physical reports, and file digital reports after they pass certain financial thresholds. While this is a reasonable model, the problem is that committees have not always been held accountable for complying with the state’s reporting requirements, particularly digital ones.
While for most committees, that threshold is $10,000, this limit is lowered to $5,000 for statewide campaigns, political parties, and Independent expenditure (IE) committees. IE expenditures are funds spent to support or oppose the nomination or election of a candidate but not made in coordination with that candidate.
These rules are grounded in statute and require anyone engaging in elections to adhere to them. While the SBE has taken steps to address problems with non-compliant candidates and political party committees, this is not the case with independent expenditure groups. An SBE attorney indicated they could not enforce this requirement due to system and manpower issues.
Challenging this notion, we reviewed all IE and Election Communications filers for the 2023-2024 election cycle. We found 42 committees that had surpassed the $5,000 threshold yet failed to file any digital reports for those years. These groups spent more than $22 million that was not digitally recorded.
Many large organizations, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic Attorney General Association, and the Republican State Leadership Committee, failed to submit digital reports for their expenditures in the 2024 election cycle.
The project took just under 10 hours, including instructions on how to pull the data, an initial review of all IE expenditures, and a secondary review. John Locke Foundation intern Kathleen Marty was given limited instructions on this project to simulate how long a review would take to correctly determine which committees were outside compliance for digital reporting.
Given the minimal time requirement from someone less familiar with the SBE website, the notion that the SBE does not have the ability to review these organizations for digital reporting requirements seems unrealistic.
Digital reporting is essential for transparency in our state’s elections. Without digital records, elections staff would have to scrape through PDFs of each committee’s reports manually; an arduous and unnecessary task given today’s technology.
At a minimum, the SBE should work to enforce our state’s election law and require these nearly invisible groups to provide transparency on their election efforts. As I have previously advocated, the state should modify election transparency law by requiring all committees to submit digital reports.
In either case, if the SBE still does not believe it has the manpower to hold organizations accountable to state law, the Locke Foundation can fill in the gap.
