Seek and Find

Cross posted from ICPR's blog, The Race is On:

Since 1998, Illinois election law has required that candidates disclose the occupation and employer of individuals who contribute more than $500 to their campaigns. ICPR used to issue report cards that graded candidates on their compliance. Initially, campaigns were spotty in their reporting, but after we handed out a few D’s and F’s, they recognized the value of this kind of reporting. We had a few rounds where pretty much everybody got A’s, and then we moved on to other issues.

Occupation and employer is back in the news with Gov. Blagojevich insisting that the Topinka campaign is in violation of the law, as in L-A-W, for failing to report occupation and employer for some of her donors. We took the bait, and sure enough, Topinka’s disclosure reports fail to include occupation and employer for some 85 of the 512 individual contributions to her campaign of more than $500. Then again, Blago’s D2s are also missing this information for a few of his donors; his campaign shows 486 individual contributions that ought to have occupation and employer, and that data is missing for four of them. We hope both candidates will C-O-M-P-L-Y with the L-A-W and amend their reports to include this information.

Some individuals can be hard to find, even after they’ve given you a big check. They must be, or both campaigns would have filed amended D2s with the information. But since they both seem to be too busy preparing for the debates, maybe our loyal blog readers can help us out. Here’s a list of the 77 people who are missing occupation and employer data (some gave more than once). If you know who there folks are, drop us a line and we’ll add it to the Sunshine Database, even if the candidates can’t get it filed with the State Board of Elections.

The whole list is tooo long to cross-post, but read it here.

Note: If you should see yourself on this list, know that a candidate you donated to needs to talk with you in order to fully fill out their disclosure reports. Please get in touch with them.