Mayor de Blasio (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)
Candidates in the running for Mayor in this year’s municipal elections filed their latest fundraising and expenditure reports with the New York City Campaign Finance Board on Monday. Mayor Bill de Blasio, the Democratic incumbent, leads the pack with more than $2.5 million in his campaign account, while those seeking to unseat him -- Democrats, Republicans, and others alike -- lag behind in terms of cash-on-hand. Those other candidates have shown varied levels of success in fundraising, and have approached spending their money differently as well. Several mayoral candidates have their eyes on the threshold for achieving public matching funds from the city’s Campaign Finance Board and the raise and spend bar for eligibility in the city-sanctioned primary debates.
With just four months till the September primary, candidates have begun to step up their fundraising efforts in order to pose a strong challenge to a mayor who is enjoying relatively comfortable polling numbers and is now able forge ahead with fundraising for the general election, having hit the maximum he can spend on the primary, with anticipated public matching funds.
De Blasio posted a $669,174 fundraising haul in the last two months and spent about $384,646. (The CFB requires campaign disclosure reports every two months in an election year.) He has raised $4.3 million and spent $1.8 million in total, leaving him with roughly $2.6 million in cash on hand. De Blasio has also consistently touted his participation in the CFB’s public matching funds program, which matches qualifying small dollar contributions up to $175 at a 6-to-1 ratio. The mayor’s latest numbers, combined with matching funds, put him over the threshold for the amount he can spend in the primary -- the limit is $6.96 million for mayoral candidates for each the primary and general -- and de Blasio can now begin to fund-raise for the general election.
“Our campaign’s focus on grassroots, small-dollar donors has powered us to more than 11,000 contributions, and we are now fully funded for a Primary campaign,” said Elana Leopold, finance director for de Blasio’s campaign, in a statement. “Under Mayor de Blasio, crime is at record lows, jobs are at record highs, and the City is building affordable housing at a record rate. New Yorkers want to keep that progress going, and that is why so many people from all five boroughs are supporting our campaign.”
At least four other candidates are running in the Democratic primary, but none has shown significant fundraising prowess. Two of the candidates are relatively known quantities - Sal Albanese, a former City Council member and a mayoral candidate in the 2013 race; and Bob Gangi, a veteran police reform advocate. Both Albanese and Gangi are vocal critics of the mayor -- with Albanese focused on the mayor’s ethics and management, and Gangi focused on the mayor’s policing policies as well as affordable housing and other programs.
Albanese has raised $82,838 so far -- $26,852 in the last filing period -- and spent $5,920 in total. Gangi has raised $6,404 for his campaign and personally loaned himself another $45,000. Having spent about $4,000, he has $47,491 in his campaign account. The two other contenders, retired FDNY lieutenant Kevin Coenen and entrepreneur Colin Slattery, have barely made a mark in fundraising.
On the Republican side, the candidate closest to de Blasio in fundraising is Paul Massey, a real estate executive who recently moved from Larchmont, Westchester to the city to run for mayor. Massey, who ran a commercial property sales business throughout the city and is also spending a lot of his own money on his campaign, raised $555,786 the last two months, but spent $1.3 million in the same time.
Massey has raised $3.03 million since the start of the race, and has personally loaned his campaign about $2.7 million, of which he’s repaid $1.1 million. But his runaway spending, totalling $3.7 million, has left him $607,963 in campaign funds. A moderate, Massey has promised to incorporate ideas from across the political spectrum and has the backing of the Independence Party. He’s vowed raise and contribute enough of his own money so that his campaign will never want for funds, but he is also spending at an unmatched clip, with the primary several months off and things just heating up.
“I am pleased with how our fundraising is going. I am the only candidate not using taxpayer funds, and I am not beholden to special interests,” Massey said in an email blast.
The only other seemingly viable Republican candidate, Assemblymember Nicole Malliotakis, just recently entered the race and began to fund-raise. Within the three weeks that she’s been running leading up to the recent filing deadline, she raised $94,624 and spent just $570. She also owes $12,000 to a marketing and polling firm. But Malliotakis is also a participant in the public funds program, meaning she will have to raise far less than Massey and still be able to be competitive. As the Staten Island Advance recently reported, Malliotakis used to bash the matching funds program as a misuse of taxpayer money.
Malliotakis has some name recognition and a base of support as an elected official. She also has a record of serving in public office, though it is unclear how much her legislative record will help her. She is decidedly more conservative than Massey, which could help her in the Republican primary but make her less viable in a general election. Fundraising, political ideology, general election viability, and other factors are being considered as Republican and Conservative county parties make their endorsements.
In an email touting her fundraising numbers, Malliotakis was confident she would meet the thresholds for the public funds program. “While I am extremely happy with our results and the potential they show, I am also well aware that we have a lot of catching up to do to match the stockpile of ‘pay-to-play’ donations in Bill de Blasio’s campaign coffers,” she said. “While he’ll continue to be funded by the special interests and the business as usual crowd, my campaign will remain focused on donations from hard-working New Yorkers who share the core belief that Bill de Blasio and his progressive policies are progressively bad for New York.”
Businessman Roque “Rocky” De La Fuente, a California native, moved to New York in April to run for mayor as a Republican. De La Fuente previously ran a longshot presidential campaign as a Democrat. He has raised $40,240, lent himself another $250,000 and spent about $2,000. He has $265,700 in cash on hand. Darren Aquino, an actor and disability rights activist, is also running on the Republican line but has raised no more than $1,800 since the start of the race, spending a little more than half that amount.
A number of independent candidates have also joined the race, most prominent among them being Richard “Bo” Dietl, a private detective and former NYPD officer with a brash Trumpian temperament. Dietl first sought to run in the Democratic primary but made an error on his registration, forcing him to run as an independent. He also attempted to get a waiver from Republican County leaders to run on the Republican line but ran afoul of the party after making apparently racist remarks about First Lady Chirlane McCray at a GOP candidate forum in Manhattan. Dietl raised $169,850 over this last filing and spent $150,818. He has raised $580,058 overall and spent $227,276, leaving $346,782 at his disposal.
Eight other independents are running for mayor as well, but most have little or no money to their name. The exception is Michael Tolkin, a millennial candidate who lent his campaign about $100,000 and raised about $2,000. He has about $15,000 left to use, however, after spending about $54,000 and owing another $32,000 for consulting fees and campaign literature.
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
Long line of voters (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayor's Office)
The executive director of the New York City Board of Elections said at a City Council budget hearing on Friday that recent failings by the board, revealed in a WNYC report, were not entirely the BOE’s responsibility and that voters in New York needed to step up their participation and involvement in ensuring that their votes count.
WNYC radio’s Brigid Bergin reported last week that more than 78,000 affidavit ballots, out of 168,000 cast by voters whose names were not listed in voter rolls in last year’s presidential election, were disqualified by the BOE and the board did not notify those voters in time for them to challenge those decisions in court and possibly have their vote count. Voters fill out affidavit ballots when they believe there is a mistake about their enrollment status, typically when their name is not in the sign-in book when they show up to cast a ballot.
If it is not counting an affidavit vote, the law requires the board to notify affidavit voters immediately by mail and those voters have 20 days to appeal. But, as WNYC found, the board only began sending notifications two days after that deadline passed and was still sending some as of last week -- six months after the election.
Friday’s City Council hearing of the Committee on Governmental Operations was part of the ongoing round of hearings on Mayor bill de Blasio’s executive budget proposal. A new fiscal year 2018 budget is due by July 1, with the mayor and the Council needing to agree on a spending plan by then. While the BOE is governed by state law, it is funded through the city budget and the City Council has oversight. The mayor and Council have virtually no control, though, over BOE operations and personnel.
The government operations committee, chaired by Council Member Ben Kallos, met to discuss the BOE’s $136.5 million proposed budget for the 2018 fiscal year. Council members sought answers from the board about the latest WNYC report, which came after a series of reports by Bergin exposing problems at the BOE, including tens of thousands of voters purged from the rolls ahead of the presidential election. Kallos said his wife was one of those voters whose vote did not count, and that she received a notice from the BOE just last month.
“There is a quasi-manual, quasi-automated process,” said Michael Ryan, BOE executive director, insisting that the board could not send notices to voters who aren’t in the system until they provide relevant missing information to the board.
Referring to a specific voter highlighted by WNYC, who shuttled numerous times between two poll sites in attempting to cast her vote, which eventually was not counted, Ryan said the voter’s actions on Election Day seemed “suspicious” and also said WNYC’s report, “simplistically analyzed a complex process.”
He also said the affidavit counting process is open and voters concerned about their votes could, and should, approach the board in the days after the election to ensure their vote was valid. “The fact that there is this burden shift to any Board of Elections...that we have to take all of the responsibility and the voters don’t have to take any of the responsibility, which seems to be the argument that’s being made here, is quite simply not fair to any government agency.”
He insisted that notifications could not be sent out to voters until the election was certified, which was done December 6 last year, nearly a month after Election Day. And the 20-day deadline to challenge a decision on a vote, he said, was a state legislative matter rather than one for the board.
“No amount of money is going to suspend the time-space continuum,” Ryan said, when Kallos asked what the board could do to give people enough time to take a decision to court. “That is something that we all must live with. That is a law of nature.”
Kallos suggested perhaps the BOE could use new technology to read voter addresses. But Ryan refuted that as well, insisting, somewhat contrary to his earlier testimony, that the process was an “entirely manual” one. “It’s the 20 days for the court challenge that is the issue, not the technology, not the process,” he added. “Again, that having been said, this is an open process and people are free a week after the election to come to the Board of Elections and challenge their affidavit if they think it’s an issue.”
He reiterated that voters must accept their part in the process as well. “There is something in this society that I think is somewhat missing and that is personal responsibility,” he said. “And it doesn't all fall to the government to fix that.”
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
City Council Member David Greenfield (photo: @NYCCouncil)
At a City Council hearing on Friday, representatives of the city’s Campaign Finance Board expected to answer questions about their proposed budget for the next fiscal year but instead found themselves defending their processes for post-election auditing of campaigns.
One of the Campaign Finance Board’s prime functions is to perform detailed examinations of how candidate campaigns utilize funds and whether they adhere to the strict requirements of campaign finance law. These post-election audits sometimes take years to complete and can involve hefty fines, in the range of thousands of dollars, for campaigns that are found to have committed campaign violations. They can also involve repayment obligations for candidates who receive public matching funds from the CFB.
Of the 234 campaigns from 2013, the last city election cycle year, the CFB has completed audits on 214, with a few more slated for completion next month, according to testimony at the hearing from CFB executive director Amy Loprest. Some of those 214, including that of Mayor Bill de Blasio, were completed earlier this year. Audits of two campaigns from the 2009 election cycle also remain incomplete, Loprest said, owing to a long-running investigation in one campaign and a legal challenge by another.
For City Council Member Ben Kallos, chair of the governmental operations committee, and City Council Member David Greenfield, a committee member, those delays in audits are just one reason that they believe the CFB’s system is flawed and in need of change. In December, Kallos, Greenfield, and other Council members ushered through nearly two dozen campaign finance related bills, some of them tweaks to how the Campaign Finance Board operates. Several of the measures were based on recommendations from the CFB, others were seen as addressing problems with the CFB identified by Council members and their consultants.
The Friday hearing did touch on the CFB’s budget needs for the next fiscal year, which begins July 1 and in which there will be a citywide election with a primary in September and a general election in November. These city elections account for a massive increase to $56.7 million for the 2018 fiscal year from last year’s CFB budget of $16.17 million.
About half of the proposed budget, $29 million, is allocated to the public matching funds program, which provides participating campaigns with 6-to-1 matches of small contributions up to $175. Another $11 million will go to printing and distributing a voter guide for the upcoming election.
But Kallos seemed more concerned that the board was spending more money, and time, on auditing campaigns than the money they received from resolutions of those audits. When Loprest told the committee that the CFB’s candidate services unit has seven full-time employees and the audit unit has 26, Kallos insisted that the CFB should dedicate more resources to candidate services and campaign liaisons, so campaigns can preemptively steer clear of missteps in navigating a complex campaign finance system, and avoid fines and penalties down the line.
“We’re trying to balance the needs of the work and be fiscally responsible,” Loprest said, welcoming the idea of more personnel funding for candidate services.
“I guess I have an overarching concern here,” Kallos responded, “just that you’re spending four times more on auditing and penalizing candidates than you are on supporting them and your candidate-to-liaison ratio far exceeds what would be allowed in a public school at this point [for student-to-teacher].” He said the candidate services unit should at least be on par with the audit unit, to provide more personal attention to campaigns, and later floated the idea of legislation to mandate it. “I feel a bill coming up,” he said.
Kallo also questioned the CFB’s spending on lobbying the state Legislature to push election and voting reforms, arguing that perhaps it needs to focus its attention closer to home in the city. The CFB’s mandated voter outreach arm, NYC Votes, engages in efforts around voter awareness, voter registration, and election law lobbying.
Greenfield was more vociferous in his rebuke of the system, repeatedly interrupting and talking over Loprest as she sought to defend the necessity of the in-depth auditing process.
Loprest told Greenfield that more than half of the 214 campaigns from 2013 that had been audited received some or the other penalty or a repayment obligation, which is not always considered a violation since it can involve leftover funds in a campaign’s account. Greenfield wasn’t pleased with the answer, seeing it as an indication that the program is faulty. “Either there’s a program that is designed for people to fail...or you’re not spending enough time and resources helping people through the program,” he said.
He added, “To me that’s a very serious concern about how the system works. If we have a system where most people who are part of the system end up failing the system, then the reflection is not on the people, rather it’s a reflection on the system.”
Greenfield said the system was unfair, painting candidates as having committed wrongdoings, as opposed to minor accounting mistakes. “Every time one of these things happens, our very capable reporters...they blow it up,” he said, pointing to the press section in the City Council chambers to illustrate his point (Greenfield repeatedly gestured toward the press section and referred to stories that look like more than they really are).
Loprest refuted his contention about CFB violations. “Many of these things are more akin to parking violations,” she said.
“I don’t think it’s fair, it’s very high stakes,” Greenfield said, interrupting Loprest and insisting that CFB violations are not as “benign” as parking tickets. “To compare it to parking tickets, I don’t think that’s really fair because you’re a government agency and the implication is that these people are engaged in some sort of wrongdoing and it gets blown out of proportion.” He pressed the point that the CFB’s audit process is in fact discouraging electoral participation, particularly for first-time candidates, and needs to be simplified.
Although Loprest pushed back, she did concede near the end of the hearing that the process could be better and that the CFB was already taking steps to that end. “One of the things we’re engaged in right now is a review of our audit processes in order to to make the audit process simpler and more streamlined,” she said.
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette