- The North Carolina Board of Elections should take inspiration from the Federal Elections Commission and create a system to track election finances, not just individual campaigns
- The North Carolina General Assembly should move to require all campaign committees to file digital reports
- The NCSBE should use the tools they have and require all campaigns to use committees’ IDs in their finance reports
Transparency is one of the most vital traits of a good, properly functioning government. As James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” explained, “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps, both.”
Not only must information be made available to people, it must also be reasonably accessible. For that reason, North Carolina needs to make significant improvements in campaign finance transparency.
In recent years, the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) has taken steps to improve transparency, working to enforce campaign finance disclosure requirements for candidate committees. Nevertheless, the NCSBE still needs to improve its enforcement of disclosure requirements on Independent Expenditure filers and, along with the General Assembly, make several other improvements to achieve greater transparency on election finances.
The three most straightforward and helpful reforms they could make would be to start tracking the finances going into each election, require all committees to submit digital reports, and require transactions between committees to use the committees’ NCSBE IDs or Federal Election Commission (FEC) IDs.
Track elections, not just candidates
The NCSBE does make information on candidates or other types of political committees available on its website, but it requires having exact names, making it especially difficult for finding information on party committees, which may be listed by abbreviations, and on fundraising data on a particular race. The FEC provides trackers for elections and specific committees, but the State Board of Elections provides data tracking only by committee.
To get full details on how much funding went into an election and from whom, you would need to know each campaign committee’s name within the NCSBE database and separately track down the independent expenditures made in that election. While there are ways to pull data in bulk, you would still run into issues if the candidate committees or those making independent expenditures did not submit digital copies of their reports.
The NCSBE could easily create a database that tracks a particular election by matching the candidate filing file to the campaign’s digital finance reports. As a project to improve transparency in elections and proof of concept, the John Locke Foundation tracked digital reports for legislative finances using just the data available on the NCSBE website.
If the NCSBE were to follow the model laid out by the FEC, it would have a single page on which members of the public could see all the finances for each given election in one accessible location. It would include each candidate’s funds raised and spent and even how much each candidate benefited from independent expenditures.
Require all committees to file digital reports
Current state law requires most committees to file digital reports only if they raise or spend more than $10,000 cumulatively in an election cycle. The threshold is half that for statewide candidates and party committees.
A surprising number of campaigns fall below the threshold. For example, when pulling data on the 2024 legislative races, we found that 42 candidates from the two major parties failed to fill out any digital reports. One is a current sitting member of the North Carolina General Assembly.
This lack of digital reports means these candidates’ fundraising and expenditures cannot be pulled in bulk, so inquiring members of the public must go through each report manually both for toplines and details on who financed an individual’s campaign. Beyond creating a barrier to the transparency of candidates’ finances, lack of digital reporting requirements severely hampers other improvements to transparency.
For instance, it would make implementing an election tracker like the FEC’s nearly impossible for lower-financed races. Without mandatory digital reporting, such a system would require transcriptions of candidate reports by the NCSBE staff.
Require committee ID information for transactions
Relying solely on the name provided in a committee report has created issues when tracking money moving from one committee to another. The NCSBE can solve this issue with tools already available to them by simply requiring the use of committee IDs. Currently, for recording campaign contributions, all that the NCSBE’s reporting software requires is the contribution information (date of the contribution, payment type, and amount of money), the contributor’s name and address, and whether the contributor is an individual or committee.
Tracking a contributor by name can be difficult, even for individuals (consider the contributor who goes by his middle name and would not show up in a search for his first and last names). The issue becomes more problematic, however, when political committees transfer money to other committees.
The NCSBE digital reporting software relies on the committee submitting the report to provide a name for the organization giving or receiving money. These names are not always consistent with other committees’ reports. This problem can best be seen in the North Carolina State Democratic Party’s 2020 campaign finance report.
The State Democratic Party reported contributions from the National Democratic Redistricting PAC under four different names, one of which was the name of a committee ineligible to contribute to a political party. This reporting created an inconsistency with the PAC’s reports and misled the public about how much funding the committee truly provided.
There is an easy solution to this problem for committee transactions: Simply require reports to include committee NCSBE or FEC IDs. Unlike names, IDs can’t vary, so using them instead would improve the accuracy of reports and help the NCSBE with its audits.
For the NCSBE’s purposes, requiring the IDs could also allow for faster and more efficient campaign audits. By having all committees submit digital reports and having IDs to match their system, the board could be less reliant on manual audits.
Creating a more perfect campaign finance reporting system
Overall, North Carolina is relatively transparent in how we conduct elections. Our voter rolls are public, election results can easily be pulled by precinct, and campaign finance search functions exist. The biggest problem is that our system is somewhat antiquated.
Small improvements to how the NCSBE presents information — requiring just a few more details from candidates and political committees — can make the state campaign finance reporting system more accessible to the average citizen.
Addressing technical issues with campaign reporting, as the NCSBE is doing, is important, but the NCSBE and General Assembly should also work to improve transparency of election finances.
