Sun: Sen. Giannetti (D-21) Inflated Campaign Finance Reports Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

From the online Baltimore Sun, August 27, 2006:

State Sen. John A. Giannetti Jr., a College Park Democrat locked in a tough re-election battle, has overstated the size of political contributions made to his campaign since 2005, artificially boosting his fundraising total by at least $30,000, according to campaign finance reports.

But Giannetti's report includes contributions that are significantly larger than the expenditures reported by the donors. In one example, Giannetti reports receiving $2,500 from the Maryland chapter of the National Association of Social Workers. The group has not reported any contributions to Giannetti.

Sue Diehl, chairwoman of the organization's political action committee, said that she could not remember whether the committee ever gave to Giannetti. But if it did, she said, it would have been for far less than the $2,500 Giannetti claimed.

John, John, John, John, John.

Disclosure (1): I am a Treasurer for a candidate in Maryland. That candidate is running for a local, non-legislative office.

Disclosure (2): John Giannetti and I were warm acquaintances and had friends in common when we both attended the University of Maryland Law School from 1991 through 1994.

The article appears to have at least two possible errors or omissions. The first is that Giannetti does not live in College Park, but in Laurel, and has lived in Laurel for some time. The second is that under Maryland law, the Treasurer and Campaign Chair certify the accuracy of a committee report. The Treasurer is Gregory Giannetti and the Chairman is Senator John A. Giannetti, Jr. himself, which is permitted under Maryland law. I don't know whether Gregory Giannetti is John's brother or uncle or father, but the "Jr." suffix to the Senator's name suggests that it is not the father. In any event, the reporter neither identified the Treasurer as Gregory Giannetti nor noted that the Treasurer even exists under Maryland law or has duties under Maryland law. There should have been an attempt to find this individual. The State of Maryland spent money to disclose the foregoing facts at this webpage.

To Giannetti's possible defense. The publicly-available software that candidates and committees use to process and report cash, check and in-kind donations and expenses is called ElecTRAK. It is current in version 4.7. It is not the most user-friendly software in existence, though it is a vast improvement from the prior proprietary hunks of garbage that were once sold to political committees and campaigns in Maryland for far too much money. ElecTRAK is free to the user.

One of the things that ElecTRAK does is that when you enter a new donation, it retains the numerical value of the last donation as a default to be changed. This is a good idea; if you have 100 donation of $25.00 each for a medium-sized fundraiser with $25 tickets, that feature does save time. It did lead me to a couple of errors during some of the larger check processings that I did, but I caught the errors on a reconciliation and the numbers added up properly (after a brutal all-nighter.)

I can understand how a last-minute, no-notice bank fee could be missed, or how an underreporting of a few dollars could happen. You are moving a lot of paper and if you do it on site at the time (probably safest administratively), you are likely to be tired and adrenalined-up at the same time. What do tired but also hyped-up Treasurers do after a fundraising night? They make a few mistakes sometimes, and fix them.

But a 18% deviation "delta" should have been caught, especially by a veteran candidate in now his fourth campaign for public office. Missing $50 or $100? Technically a violation but entirely understandable. Misidentifying a couple of donors? Ditto. Treasurers have to be registered voters other than the candidate, but that's it. No accounting skills required to take the job, so errors happen. The State Board of Elections has a procedure for amending a return, usually not that big of a deal. The State requires a reconciliation of the income and outflow against the last known bank statement to minimize or eliminate the errors. Multiple errors about actual money - not about an appraisal of an in-kind service of questionable value, but actual green-money spendable and to be deposited in an authorized bank account - totalling $30,000 is enormous, even out of a total campaign coffer of almost $200,000.

Giannetti has had a colorful career in the Senate, supplying no end of stories and drama. District 21 is not what I would consider the most fanatic of good-government districts, and the Democratic primary voters might let this slide, if this were Giannetti's first hiccup. It's not.

I don't know what else to say at this point. I like Giannetti, a moderate, leaning conservative Democrat from the most "purple" part of Prince George's County. I hope that he crawls out of this one, if only for my own selfish interesy in the continuation of my blog's future delivery of political entertainment content.