What Charles G. Koch Can Teach Us About Campaign Finance Data

Lasrick writes "Lee Drutman is a political scientist with the Sunlight Foundation who does terrific work. In this article, he attempts to trace campaign donations made by one of the Koch Brothers and discovers just how difficult it is to do: 'The case of Charles G. Koch is a nice lesson in just how hard it is to determine who is breaking and who is abiding by campaign finance limits. It's hard to make accurate tallies of individual aggregate campaign contributions when the Federal Elections Commission doesn't require donors to have a unique ID, and when campaigns don't always reliably report donor names. Given this, it is unclear how the FEC would even enforce its own aggregate limit rules. The FEC's spokesperson told me that while the FEC welcomes complaints, it does not typically take enforcement initiative."'

Comments

Re:Why Koch and not Soros?

[kwbauer]

And Soros astroturfed MoveOn, etc. into existence. The question posed was why does one direction seem to be legally sactioned but not the other. If Koch brothers are wrong and Soros is not, then we are making legal rulings based on political ideology and that is definitely not something to support... unless you are a leftist.