Getting an accurate number of how much money truly goes into North Carolina elections is complicated. While there are ways to pull large quantities of campaign finance data through the North Carolina State Board of Elections’ (NCSBE) advanced search system, the system has flaws.
While there are ways to build a system to compare each candidate’s contributions and spending in any given election (though this does require some additional data matching work), there is no simple way to compile independent expenditures (IEs) and electioneering communications.
One major issue is committees failing to file their required digital reports. This was seen in the 2024 election, when 42 organizations failed to file required digital reports, obfuscating more than $22 million in IE spending. Though non-compliant filings alone create significant issues for election financial transparency, there are other systemic issues that can’t be solved by requiring these committees to adhere to the law.
At its core, the NCSBE system is not designed to pull outside expenditures correctly. Two issues occur when trying to use the search system to pull the data in bulk:
- For some organizations, the declaration of funds doesn’t appear in the file.
- Duplication of information from standard reports and independent expenditure reports.
Those problems are not consistent across reports. Some groups’ information is recorded correctly, with no duplications and clear indications of who the money was spent for or against. This inconsistency means you can’t simply remove this data, adding to the complexity of trying to track IE and electioneering communications properly.
These issues can easily be seen in the 2024 data pull of all IE and electioneering communication groups here.
Declarations not included
For both electioneering communications and independent expenditures, these expenditures go toward benefiting or opposing a candidate. Reviewing all of the independent expenditure and electioneering communication reports (this does not include quarterly reports) through the NCSBE’s advanced search system reveals that more than $21 million is being spent without a declared candidate benefiting from those funds.
The issue is not that these groups failed to include this data; the information is there when pulling the individual reports. The problem is that the system is not designed to pull this data, particularly when an expenditure benefits more than one candidate. This is likely because the system is designed to track where the money is going rather than each candidate’s portion of those expenses.
This can be seen with reports from groups like “MAINSTREET MERCHANTS FOR A BETTER NC.” The individual reports indicate each candidate and the amount they benefited from the expense. When pulling the data in bulk, the system only addresses the organization that received the funds (Stellium Strategies, The Differentiators LLC, MPITOO, etc)
There does not appear to be a workaround for this problem. This means that to compile the digital reports to show the declarations properly, you must pull each report individually and then compile them into one spreadsheet. This time-consuming process would be the only way to ensure the correct allocation for these digital files.
Information being duplicated
The issue of duplication, if consistent, could be solved by simply removing the standard reports and only reviewing the IE and electioneering communication reports. However, some IE groups fail to submit electioneering communication reports.
Of the IE and electioneering communications committees that only submit quarterly reports, more than $16 million has been declared for or against a candidate. If the data were filtered to only include IE and election communication reports, this significant election spending would fall through the cracks.
How to pull data accurately under the present setup
Because of the various issues of committees failing to file digital reports, duplicated data, and bulk data pulls failing to consistently add who the spending is for, the only way to accurately pull the data is to manually go through every single independent expenditure file and tally them together.
This means manually downloading and combining each digital report, reviewing each image-only report, and manually entering the expenditures from that committee. Even doing this arduous process, you would still be missing information from the committees that engaged in IE spending but only filed standard reports. To capture this information, you would need to pull the data from the advanced search function from IE and electioneering communication groups and add these reports.
Finally, to ensure you aren’t doubling up on reported expenditures, you must cross-check groups to make sure that they did not file both quarterly and independent expenditure reports. Assuming that groups that engaged in North Carolina’s elections filed reports as they were required to, this would finally give you a reasonable idea of how much IE money was spent in North Carolina elections.
Even with all this data, you would still need to match the candidates to the election they ran for, which requires an entirely separate process.
The NCSBE needs to develop a better process for capturing IE and Electioneering Communication data.
This will likely require not just better enforcement of North Carolina’s current campaign finance laws but also a new tracking system for elections. At a minimum the NCSBE should improve how IE money is tracked as it is not reasonable to do so under the current system.
The introduction of AI systems to better parse data may be a good stopgap until a new system is in place, but it would likely be only a temporary solution. Even still, the current format for retaining independent expenditure data is unreasonable and must be addressed for future elections.
