Report: Florida’s Broken Campaign Finance System
Integrity Florida has released its report on Florida’s campaign finance system. During testimony before the Florida House of Representatives Ethics & Elections Subcommittee Dan Krassner and Ben Wilcox stated, “Currently, Florida law limits direct contributions to candidates to $500 per contributor per election cycle, but clearly there are glaring loopholes to these limits. Nearly seventy-five percent of all of the money raised in the 2012 election cycle avoided candidate accounts and instead flowed through ‘so-called’ independent committees and political parties based on Integrity Florida analysis of state-level campaign contribution data from the Florida Division of Elections database.”
“Because some of the money is transferred from a CCE to an ECO or PC — often in a veiled attempt to shield the donor and recipient from the disclosure — some of the contributions are double counted. With several types of funding vehicles allowing unlimited contributions, it is time to admit that donation limits are not stopping any contributors from spending unlimited amounts of money, ” noted Krassner and Wilcox.
The report points out that from 1981 to 1990, there were 340 federal public corruption convictions by United States Attorneys’ Offices of Florida officials, according to U.S. Department of Justice data. That number more than doubled between 1991 and 2000 reaching 715 convictions and dropped just slightly between 2001 and 2010 to 674.
Read the full report and it recommendations:
