Voice of OC (https://voiceofoc.org/tag/campaign-finance/)
Government emails and text messages about enforcement of Orange County’s campaign finance laws will be destroyed two years after they’re sent or received, under a policy county supervisors approved Tuesday.
The Disneyland Resort has spent almost $1 million to influence Anaheim city council campaigns and oppose a minimum wage initiative with three weeks to go before the Nov. 6 election, more than it spent at this point ahead of the 2016 election.
Voters have no way of seeing who provided the $2.6 million-plus in dark money supporting or opposing candidates in the four Orange County races key to the battle for control of Congress.
Orange County officials released the names of six candidates and 18 donors involved in returned campaign donations that may have exceeded legal limits, after previously declining to make them public.
Supervisors structured the county enforcement so that when violators are caught by the county enforcement officials, they can return the illegal money and the matter goes away quietly.
Whether you’re a California voter, business owner or run a special interest group, if you want to be a big election donor, you can find a way to get your money in.
Several Anaheim, Santa Ana, Irvine and other city council members and candidates reported robust fundraising for the first six months of 2017, according to the latest campaign finance disclosures.
County supervisors picked Denah Hoard, the senior assistant city attorney for Orange, as the first executive director of the county’s still-unformed Campaign Finance and Ethics Commission.
Orange County Supervisor Andrew Do’s office spent over $240,000 in taxpayer money on a stream of mass mailers. Now it appears that many of the mailers were targeted based on powerful voter databases normally used by political campaigns.
The state Fair Political Practices Commission determined that Solorio, a lobbyist and Santa Ana City Council Candidate, broke the law by using campaign funds on an apartment he is renting for personal use.