Dodgy donors prompt $56G Baker ‘purge’
Call it The Purge: Election Year. Gov. Charlie Baker this month paid $56,000 out of his campaign account to the commonwealth after a state audit revealed a number of unlawful or poorly explained donations tucked into his 2014 gubernatorial campaign finance reports.
The sum appears to be the most a state candidate has ever had to “purge” to the state, and includes money Baker received from corporations (a legal nono), realty trusts (also prohibited) and money passed under so-called “handwritten names,” where a contributor may not be a signatory on the account the money came from.
Such audits by the Office of Campaign and Political Finance are common and conducted every four years, and, given the millions of dollars some candidates take in and spend, they can often churn up thousands of misreported or inappropriate money that slipped through during a campaign.
But according to a Herald review of “purges” or audit payments listed in OCPF records, the $55,795 that Baker gave earlier this month is the most ever.
Former Gov. Deval Patrick once purged $46,564 to the state in 2012. And the third most? That also came from Baker, when he cut OCPF a check for $44,020 from his 2010 audit.
Lieutenant Gov. Karyn Polito was ordered to purge $14,025 after her own audit completed this year. Martha Coakley, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in 2014, paid $2,000.
The money, however, represents mere pennies in Baker’s record-breaking campaign account. The Republican had $3.97 million on hand as of mid-month, according to his latest campaign finance report, meaning the roughly $56,000 accounted for just 1.4 percent of his total war chest.
Jim Conroy, Baker’s campaign manager, called the audit a “routine process that we were happy to work with OCPF on and now resolve.”
The 13-page audit into Baker’s campaign did turn up another interesting nugget: Among the contributions auditors flagged was one from H. Ross Perot, the 1992 presidential candidate, and his wife, Sarah. The $1,000 check they submitted had one name on it but was credited in records to two people. Dual ballot
Baker is pushing two separate ballot questions — hoping to get a “yes” on more charter schools and a “no” on legalizing marijuana — and he is defending outside money on the former and condemning it on the latter fight.
On the charter school push, campaigns supporting Question 2 have drawn millions of dollars from outside the state. The committee Great Schools Massachusetts, for example, took $1 million from a New York advocacy group in the past three weeks alone.
“We live in an internet age and that makes drawing lines around state borders on this tough and complicated,” Baker said last week. “I think as long as the money is supporting an issue, it’s going to be really hard to draw a line ... based on geography.”
On the other hand, the campaign Baker is leading to oppose Question 4, which would legalize marijuana, has repeatedly pointed out that the question’s proponents have drawn the vast majority of their money from out of state.
“More Outside Marijuana Industry Money Flows Into Massachusetts,” screamed the subject line of an email the committee sent — the day after Baker made his comments about how tough it is to keep outside money out of a ballot question campaign.
Now, legalization opponents’ main argument is that all that outside money is coming from those who would benefit financially from the question passing. But the dual arguments — rationalizing the presence of outside money in one push and denouncing it another — creates a dichotomy that’s hard to ignore.