Remember back on May 17th, when I did a post on Toby Doeden’s PAC filing a document that noted a $100,000 donation from him to his “Dakota First Action” PAC?
The law very clearly lays out what is and is not permitted:
12-27-9. Limits on contributions to political action committee–Violation as misdemeanor .
A political action committee may accept contributions during any calendar year as follows:
(1) Not to exceed ten thousand dollars from a person;
(2) Not to exceed ten thousand dollars from an entity;
(3) Without limit from a political action committee;
(4) Without limit from a political party;
(5) Without limit from a candidate campaign committee; and
(6) Not to exceed ten thousand dollars from a ballot question committee.
Any contribution from a person who is an unemancipated minor shall be deducted from the total contribution permitted under this section by the unemancipated minor’s custodial parent or parents. A violation of this section is a Class 2 misdemeanor. A subsequent offense within a calendar year is a Class 1 misdemeanor.
So, since Toby Doeden filed a document with the Secretary of State noting that he gave more, I brought it up to them, and sent an e-mail asking if they were going to do anything about it.
Good Morning.
I wanted to draw your attention to the campaign finance report for “Dakota First Action” political action committee that was filed yesterday with the Secretary of State’s office, which appears to indicate an impermissible donation was accepted by the committee.
According to the report, Toby Doeden of Aberdeen, SD donated $100,000 to the committee, despite the requirements of SDCL 12-27-9, which limits said donations to $10,000 from any one person.
In addition to this violation, I also believe the Committee at the direction of Mr. Doeden to be a serial violator of campaign disclaimer laws, with examples attached of the thousands of text messages without disclaimers being sent across the state. I do realize I may not have standing, as I did not receive these, but I draw it to your attention.
Thank you for your consideration and review.
Pat Powers
And what was the result? After a few days ruminating over it, on May 21st I received the following:
Hello Pat,
Our website has outlined the campaign finance complaint process.
https://sdsos.gov/elections-voting/campaign-finance/campaign-finance-complaint-procedure.aspxThank you,
Rachel Soulek
Director, Division of Elections
Wait, what?
I can understand if they wanted a specific complaint on the text messages. But this is the Secretary of State’s response on a document that was required to be filed with them which contains blatant and shameless violations of campaign finance law? Are they kidding? While there is a campaign finance complaint process, I know of nothing in law that prevents the Secretary of State from acting on the obvious.
So, fine. As of today, I have filed the affidavit, and the ball is in the Secretary of State’s court:
Dakota First Action_Toby Doeden Affidavit by Pat Powers on Scribd
Hopefully by filing the affidavit, some action can be spurred with regards to the shameless violation of state law when it comes to a renegade political committee (at least appearing to) completely ignore the fairly loose campaign finance laws that are in place in South Dakota.
So. We’ll see what happens.
For those who are ultimately elected this fall, maybe they should take this example and be spurred to action as to the failure of how we’ve currently structured enforcement of our campaign finance laws.
I’m one of the first ones to point out that law enforcement has bigger and far more important things to do. They need to move these away from criminal penalties that no one enforces unless it’s the worst of the worst violations. They should go back to making things administrative penalties (like they used to have) for the small potatoes, and put an actual system in place to act on it when someone skips the disclaimers, flouts campaign finance law, and allow for some some actual resolution.
Why have laws then?
Oh wait…because then she would be single handedly be going after the people that put her in office! What in the actual eff.
Speaking of lax campaign election laws Brown County would be a hot market for some Doeden Dumpsterfire signs. I’d wager it would be real easy to get volunteers to put up 4x8s medium and yard size signs all over ideally placing them in close proximity to the diver signs. They would bring a good chuckle and spur conversation.
There should be a law bill coming that banishes scofflaw organizations like this, and the scofflaws theirownselfs, from being eligible to run for the legislatures. Certainly there are some lawful fellows left in the legislatures who can bring such a law bill and publicly shame Ms. Monae.
Adelstein used to do this in Rapid, he just did it the right way and set up 10 different PACs that he donated to and then donated to all one. Check is the same just more paperwork. Should be fixed but the legislature won’t give the SOS more power and authority.
Would you give.Monae more power? Really?
This is sad that we have campaign finance laws, we submit the reports and our SOS office ignores obvious errors and omissions! This is a big issue this primary… I note several that have not filed required year end reports and no consequences? We can not let this issue drop.
What a joke. Who is running for this post in two years?
Why can’t we have a primary election for Secretary of State?
Candidates need to be sorted out by running an election instead of doing the LDD tour with imbeciles that run each county party.
we should have our Constitutional officers elected in primaries but between the loons calling for jungle primaries and the loons who vote at conventions, it’s gone to point that neither prospect is appealing any more.
The convention process could have been repaired years ago by changing the date of the convention to a month before the primary, or having the precinct committee men and women not take office until July 1 of the year in which they are elected, or not giving them the privilege of voting at convention since they aren’t doing the job they signed up for anyway. But nobody wanted to do anything because they were afraid of “blowback.”
So then we hoped the legislature would do it, and require the candidates to acquire their nominations via the primary process but they were afraid to change anything either.
So here we are. We have the craziest people in the state taking over the SDGOP and they will be nominating the constitutional officers based on how convincingly they agree with batshit crazy conspiracy theories. Eventually the sanerest of the population will decide a jungle primary would elect better officials.