West Virginia Special Election Candidates Face Campaign Finance Trouble

Several candidates in this October’s special West Virginia gubernatorial election recently encountered a campaign finance hurdle when the state attorney general’s office issued an opinion that campaign contributions raised before the 2011 election was announced cannot be used for this year’s election. The candidates had been raising money in preparation for the regularly scheduled governor’s election, which will be held in 2012.
 
The question arose when gubernatorial candidate and current Secretary of State Natalie Tennant requested an advisory opinion from the attorney general as to whether money raised for the 2012 election could be applied to the 2011 special election. In response, Managing Deputy Attorney General Barbara Allen issued an opinion that money raised for 2012 could only be transferred to another campaign after the scheduled general election had passed. According to the opinion, if candidates want to use money raised for the 2012 campaign for this year’s campaign, they have to return it to the donor (in the hope that it will be immediately re-donated for the 2011 campaign) or have it repurposed for the 2011 election (with the donor’s permission).
 
The opinion affects the five candidates (of fourteen total) running in 2011 who had filed their pre-candidacy declarations for 2012: acting Democratic Gov. and Senate President Earl Ray Tomblin; Secretary of State Tennant; Democratic state Treasurer John Perdue; Republican Sen. Clark Barnes; and Republican Putnam County attorney Mark Sorsaia. 
 
The affected candidates are expected to request that the returned funds be re-donated to their 2011 campaigns or to request that the donors allow them to “re-designate” their donations to this year’s campaign, a potentially onerous and expensive process. 
 
Allen made clearthat the opinion was purely hypothetical and that the attorney general’s office was not rendering an opinion on the specific situation of any of the candidates. However, both the Tomblin and Perdue campaigns, which reportedlyhave raised the most in donations, appear to be taking the letter seriously and plan to return donations made to their 2012 campaigns and ask that they be re-donated for their 2011 efforts.
 
Brendan Glavin, a data manager with the Campaign Finance Institute, thinks that the candidates who return or request to re-designate 2012 contributions will not have an overly difficult time of it, though he acknowledges that “it is a logistical pain.”
 
However, Glavin points out that if a donor allows a donation to be re-designated, the money in question never has to be removed from the campaign’s bank account. “Doing a re-designation would likely be a lot easier from a logistics standpoint,” says Glavin. “Anything that keeps them from having to write checks back I’m sure they would consider a plus.”
 Noah Rothman is the online editor at C&E. Email him at nrothman@campaignsandelections.com