How One Brown Student Shut Down The NRA
One morning last month, Rhode Islanders woke up to the news that the National Rifle Association had been charged with the second-largest campaign finance ethics violation in state history. In a settlement reached by the Rhode Island Board of Elections, the NRA admitted that it improperly funneled money from its national Political Action Committee (or "PAC"
to the Rhode Island-specific PAC, illegal under state law. The PAC was fined a historic $63,000.
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In September of last year, Bell filed a formal complaint on behalf of the Progressive Democrats, alleging three specific violations. Here is the Campaign Finance 101 digest of what Bell alleged:
1. A federal-state PAC conspiracy. Rhode Island law says that if a PAC is registered in Rhode Island, it cannot receive money from any federally registered PAC. The first and most obvious complaint alleged that the NRA’s federal PAC was sending money to the Rhode Island state PAC — a violation of Rhode Island law.
2. A failure to report donations. Rhode Island law says that any candidate, campaign or PAC must disclose the name and address of anyone who donates more than $100. The second complaint alleged that there was a high likelihood that many “donors” to the NRA’s Rhode Island PAC (if there were any at all) must have given more than $100, just by sheer odds. According to BPR’s analysis, the NRA Rhode Island PAC’s “aggregated individual” (i.e. undisclosed) contributions amounted to over $160,000. For the NRA to be innocent, that means that not a single donation — once, ever — over a ten-year period and among these hundreds of thousands was ever over $100.
3. A violation of the overall campaign contribution limit. Rhode Island Law limits any candidate, campaign or PAC from receiving more than $1,000. If Bell's first complaint was true, that would likely mean that the NRA was sloshing it's money from its national coffers into the RI PAC. Since many of these donations were over $1,000 (in the October 2012 filing above, the contribution is $1,200) — and if that money came from NRA's national PAC as Bell alleges — that would mean the NRA's Rhode Island PAC illegally received more than $1,000 from a single source.
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