Progressive Hawaii Now, a political action committee supporting clean elections, has been fined more than $3,000 for a cascading series of minor campaign spending law violations during and after the 2012 election campaign.
Progressive Hawaii Now reported receiving $2,650 in contributions and spending just $2,187.47 in support of several progressive candidates running in last year’s election, so it was by no means a big political player.
But the PAC dug itself deeper and deeper into a hole at every turn as the Campaign Spending Commission enforcement of a minor late reporting violation led to discovery of additional related but similarly minor violations.
Larger PACs representing special interests would have easily handled the initial errors by turning them over to their well-paid consultants and campaign staff. But the Progressive Hawaii Now PAC was operating on a shoe-string and had trouble dealing with the arcane minutiae of current campaign reporting requirements.
It’s been a pretty tough lesson in the specifics of campaign accounting for these clean election advocates.
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Bizarre to the max.
For those of us not in the weeds on this, what is the significance of all this? What’s the takeaway?
“Do as I say, not as I do.”
What is Progressive Hawaii Now?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Thanks, Kory, I appreciate your efforts.
As long as government (the monopolists of violence and coercion) makes it their business to favor some and disfavor other private economic activities, and to expand its reach into everyone’s lives, regulating, prodding, sanctioning, preferring, and favoring the big and the organized with complex regulations — you’ll never get money out of politics. There’s too much money at stake in the decisions they make. This quixotic campaigner and friends ran into the meat grinder of the Campaign Spending Commission relentless rules, written by incumbents to make sure that the hurdle to elective office remains as high as possible. Politics has become a specialty all its own, as challenging in its own way as science, engineering, business…but focused on creating a dense thicket of laws and rules as protective coloration for the few who get into it and consistently prevail. If the quixotic desire for public funding of campaigns were successful, guess who would be deciding who runs for office? The government. Hmmmm…. …An ancient Greek sage once said “Laws are like cobwebs which entangle the weak, but through which the strong pass, unharmed.”