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The city of Portland’s Small Donor Elections program is sorting through campaign contributions that City Council candidates made to other City Council candidates.
Overseers of the public financing program are trying to determine which donations were made under explicit agreements of reciprocity, a matter the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office is investigating after WW exposed the swaps this month.
Related: These 14 candidates for city office agreed in writing to exchange donations.
Small Donor Elections director Susan Mottet says such contributions are not eligible to be matched with taxpayer dollars, but donations from one candidate to one another are viable for matching dollars if no one promised reciprocity. To figure out which is which, Mottet is hand-checking mutual donations if they were received after Aug. 7.
“For now, the program is marking contributions from candidates starting on Aug. 7 on as unmatchable, until we have complete data and can determine which contributions we are required to match and which contributions we are required not to match,” Mottet said last week.
That means candidates who are close to the 250 individual donors needed to receive matching funds, and whose donations from fellow candidates may have pushed them over that threshold, are now in limbo as to whether they qualify for matching funds.
One such candidate is Harrison Kass, who’s running for a seat in District 3. He says he’s at 249 donations with a “dozen or so donations in ‘purgatory’” and says he won’t know if he qualified for matching funds until next Tuesday. (Kass did agree to swap donations with fellow candidates, according to records obtained by WW.)
“The purgatory donations are from other candidates and candidate spouses, and in my view, are completely legitimate donations,” Kass says. “[The] SDE delay has negatively impacted my campaign. One, I am short on cash, obvious problem. Two, endorsing organizations are waiting to see if I match.”