By Michael Beckel
Super PACs are supposed to disclose the identities of their donors.
Except when they don’t, exactly.
Nearly all of the money raised by the Citizens for a Working America PAC, a super PAC that’s spent more than $2 million on ads boosting businessman David Perdue in Georgia’s contentious Republican U.S. Senate primary, has come from two “social welfare” nonprofits connected to an Ohio lobbyist, according to aCenter for Public Integrity review of campaign finance records.
Such nonprofits may keep their own donors secret. And although nonprofit groups rarely donate to super PACs, the practice worries some campaign finance reformers who fear these transfers leave voters uninformed about who is actually funding political campaigns in their states.
(Update, July 11, 2014, 8:48 p.m.: Joe Trotter, a spokesman for the Center for Competitive Politics, said because the nonprofit donors were named there was “no ‘subversion’ of disclosure rules… Once someone gives money to an organization, if the money is not earmarked, that person does not control what the organization does with the money, and, therefore, isn’t individually responsible for the actions taken by the organization.”)
