August 6, 2013

Dead People Have Donated Nearly $600K to Campaigns Since 2009

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Yes, dead people contribute to political campaigns. No, they’re not zombies. USA Today reports:

The dead can’t vote, but they can give money to politicians.

Thirty-two people listed on federal campaign records as “deceased” have contributed more than $586,000 to congressional and presidential candidates and political parties since Jan. 1, 2009.

This isn’t a scandal or weird error. Federal campaign rules allow Americans to make political candidates or committees the beneficiaries of their estates. (Dead people can also leave their money to charities, for instance.) According to the USA Today analysis of FEC filings, 32 dead people contributed the nearly $600,000 to presidential and congressional candidates and committees. The Democratic National Committee received $245,176 of the zombie cash, $163,200 went to the Libertarian Party, $96,329 went to the Green Party, $31,203 went to the Obama Victory Fund, and $25,000 went to the National Committee for an Effective Congress.

Currently, there is a case pending before a federal appellate court in Washington, DC, that seeks to overturn limits on political contributions from dead donors. (Limits on contributions are supposed to help curb political corruption, whether the money comes from breathing person or a deceased individual’s estate.) The case involves a man who left more than $217,000 to the Libertarian National Committee in 2007. “A dead person can’t corrupt someone,” Alan Gura, attorney for the Libertarian Party, argued. The fight over zombie campaign cash continues.

h/t Political Wire

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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