Big money is moving in this election, but when it comes to who’s watching the money in elections in Maryland, the answer is not a whole lot of people. You’ve got the State Board of Elections, but in terms of stalwart non-partisan, civil society organizations that watch who’s paying whom and how much… there’s really just the one: Common Cause Maryland.
The group’s office -- sandwiched between an architecture firm and a lobbyist, of all things -- is just a few blocks down from the State House in Annapolis. A very short tour reveals three desks, two for summer interns who’ve gone back to school. “They’re gone now so they’ve been replaced by the plants to keep this place vibrant,” Jennifer Bevan-Dangle, the group's director, quips.
But all joking aside, Bevan-Dangle says her one-woman operation leaves some of the digging that needs to be done undug. This summer, she wanted her interns to figure out how many people made campaign donations totaling more than $10,000 dollars. That’s the aggregate limit that Maryland used to have before the Supreme Court struck down aggregate limits in April. The interns started digging – got halfway through the alphabet – found more than three hundred donors – and then the interns had to leave the list unfinished and go back to school
“Funders like to fund issue-based groups. They want to see clean water; they want to see healthy children. And those are all critically important to do and to achieve,” Bevan-Dangle says. “But there are very few people willing to invest in the infrastructure itself, is the democracy working in the way it should, is it meeting our highest ideals?”
The other person in Maryland who’s watching campaign donations is Jared DeMarinis, who runs the state board of elections’ campaign finance division. And if this seems like a woefully limited ability to trawl through the thousands of campaign filings to make sure things are in order, DeMarinis says it’s not so dire.
“The one thing about politics and elections that I’ve found is it is a very self-regulated business,” DeMarinis says.
Just this week Republican Larry Hogan’s campaign filed a complaint alleging illegal coordination between Democrat Anthony Brown and a state super PAC. Hogan’s taken fire from Brown’s camp over what he’s paying for the bus he rents from himself … and his campaign’s relationship to Change Maryland, the advocacy group he founded and that his later campaign purchased.
“The state is basically here as more of a referee and a point of information,” DeMarinis says. “You have your combatants in the ring and they’re going through things with a fine-tooth comb.”
News outlets also play a role says Del. Jon Cardin, D-Baltimore County, who chairs the election law subcommittee in the House of Delegates. And while newsrooms are shrinking and editors have less appetite for lengthy investigations, Cardin says bad press remains a powerful deterrent.
“Nobody wants to be on the front page of the Sun or the Post or the lead story on WYPR because they are in violation and they were investigated and they are found to have violated these campaign finance laws,” Cardin says.
It’s just a matter of getting those campaign finance laws right.
