Portland’s historic charter reform resulted in nearly 100 candidates running for a seat on the expanded city council and 19 Portlanders running for mayor. For those running for office, Portland’s Small Donor Election program promises to match funding to donations and provide their campaigns with taxpayer dollars.
Exactly 52 candidates qualified for the program this election cycle. But reporting from Willamette Week shows some of the “creative” ways candidates met the threshold to receive funds, from mutual donations between candidates to hiring nonprofit organizations to collect donations for them. Sophie Peel is a reporter for WW and has been following this election closely. She joins us to share more on the role the Small Donor Program played this election and how it compares to other cities with similar programs such as Seattle.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Portland’s historic charter reform resulted in nearly 100 candidates running for seats on the expanded city council and 19 folks running for mayor. Most of those candidates sought taxpayer money for their campaigns through the city’s Small Donor Election program. Nearly half of them qualified. The basic idea of the program is that candidates who can demonstrate some level of grassroots support should be able to tap into public money to boost their profiles. But during and in the aftermath of this past election, a number of issues have called into question whether the system is working as intended.
Willamette Week’s Sophie Peel has been writing about this more than any other Portland area reporter, and she joins us now for an update. Sophie, welcome back.
Sophie Peel: Thanks for having me.
Miller: Can you first just remind us the basics of how Portland’s current public campaign finance system works?
Peel: Yes. The city’s program is called the Small Donor Elections program. It matches small donations, up to $20, by up to a 9-to-1 ratio in taxpayer dollars. So a $5 donation becomes a $50 donation, and a $20 donation becomes a $200 donation. Candidates qualify for the program by getting at least 250 small donations from distinct Portlanders. And then after they get that 250 they can unlock taxpayer dollars, and then there are additional tiers as they are able to reach more donations. So if they get 750 donations, they can unlock more taxpayer dollars.
Miller: When the members of the city council created that system in 2016, there was no way they could have known just how many people were going to be running on the ballot this year. What did that mean in terms of the available money?
Peel: This program has always had a fairly modest budget. And that’s because we’ve never had more than nine or 10 candidates who have been running for any of the city positions. That includes mayor, auditor and city council. And of course, when Portland passed the charter reform measure in November 2022, it opened up the floodgates to a ton of people thinking they were going to run for office. This cycle, I believe that the total tally was 118 people running for office.
In 2016, when the [city council] passed this very well intentioned program, it had a pretty modest budget from the city’s general budget. And I just don’t think anyone could have seen this coming.
Miller: So I want to turn to three different categories – we can call it rule bending, rule breaking, potentially that has not been adjudicated yet – that we saw this cycle. We should take them one by one. The first is one that you and I actually talked about before. Can you remind us what happened with donation swapping?
Peel: Fourteen candidates for city council and for mayor had put explicitly in writing to other candidates that they were going to give the other person a small donation, with the explicit agreement that that other candidate was going to give them a donation back. And that’s quid pro quo. Elections attorneys will say that that’s likely a violation of Oregon State statutes that basically prohibits any candidate for political office from offering something of value in return for a donation. So in this case, the thing of value offered was a $5 donation in exchange for another $5 donation.
That is currently being investigated by the Secretary of State’s office last I checked, which was about a week-and-a-half ago. There have been no updates, so I’m not really sure how that investigation is going. That was in early September when we first wrote about the donation swapping.
Miller: Some of them were on record saying this. But many other candidates actually effectively did this – there are records of candidate A giving money to candidate B, and vice versa. So how did all these candidates justify this?
Peel: Yeah, it’s really interesting. So they said they did it in the spirit of camaraderie. This election cycle really fostered a lot of, at least on the surface, collaboration and good feelings amongst candidates who all felt like they were running grassroots campaigns. And they wanted to get support wherever they could, even if it was from fellow candidates. So it was very much in the spirit of collaboration, is what they said. And then after we wrote about it, and the Secretary of State’s office launched an investigation, that’s now become the defense of candidates: “Look, I didn’t mean any malice by this, I wasn’t trying to tap taxpayer dollars in an unethical or schemy way. I figured I would get support where I could and offer support to my fellow candidates.”
Miller: I was still a little bit confused as to why the city itself hasn’t weighed in on this. As you said, we’re still waiting to hear what the secretary of state says. But what has the city’s Small Donor Elections program itself said about this way to beef up contributor numbers?
Peel: They’ve said very little, they have not taken a position on this. So it turns out that the city’'s Small Dollar Election program was actually aware of the candidate swapping as early as August 20, because a city council candidate had flagged it for them, saying, “Look, I’m really uncomfortable with this. I’m on this chain, all these candidates are asking to swap donations. I don’t think this is right as a taxpayer.” And the program basically referred this candidate to the Secretary of State’s office and said there’s the state law that might apply, but this is not within our purview. There’s no program rule against this, there’s no city elections rule against this. So if this is a thing you’re really concerned about, you gotta take it to the state level.
The program itself, they didn’t take a position on the potential legality of the swapping. But what they did do is basically set aside all the candidate-to-candidate donations. And they said, “OK, if we can show written proof that this was a donation that was mutually agreed upon in writing to be swapped, then we won’t match that with taxpayer dollars.” But that’s really the extent of what they did.
Miller: So that’s one scenario. Another was focused on just one candidate. What was Ben Hufford accused of doing?
Peel: So Ben Hufford co-owns a nightclub called Fortune. And on the night of August 31, in the wee hours of the morning of September 1, he was allegedly standing basically at the front of the line at that bar and telling patrons “hey, either you pay my campaign $10, or you pay a $20 cover charge.” Or to others, he allegedly said “look, this is just sort of how the cover charge is working tonight, you just pay my campaign.” So between August 31 and September 1, he received 170 donations. And the most he had received in any day leading up to that was 18 donations. So it was a total anomaly.
Some of the bar patrons I spoke to, even when they were in the line getting propositioned, they were deeply uncomfortable with it, feeling like this something doesn’t feel quite right here. But they also figured, look, I just want to get into this bar. I can either pay $20 or $10. Of course, I’m gonna pay $10. It was interesting, all these donors are a matter of public record, so I was sort of going down the list and figuring a little bit out about them. And they were mostly people in their 20s and early 30s who are not necessarily politically in tune with city politics. And yet, that’s where Ben got a ton of donations from that night.
Miller: Were those donations matched by taxpayer dollars?
Peel: No. They would have been, had Ben Hufford received 750 donations. So Ben did reach the 250 donations, which allowed him to unlock up to $40,000 in taxpayer dollars. By that night, he’d already received $40,000. Now, if he had reached 750, which he didn’t – I think he was about 150 donations shy of that number – he would have been able to unlock a second tranche of another additional $40,000, so up to $80,000. So if he had received that extra 150 by the deadline, those would have been matched, likely.
Miller: Is what he did, or what he’s alleged to have done, allowed technically under the city’s system?
Peel: Under the city system, yes. Elections attorneys will say what Huffer did violated the same state statute that candidates potentially violated when they agreed to swap donations, which is the statute against undue influence. But the city’s program has no rules against that. They’re sort of leaving it up to the state to adjudicate that.
There have been a couple of complaints filed with the Secretary of State’s office about Ben Hufford that night. They actually tossed out both of those complaints, saying that a news article does not constitute basically enough evidence to launch an investigation. I know one of the complainants has appealed that decision to the Multnomah County district attorney. It’ll be interesting to see how that all shapes out.
Miller: Finally, there are various contribution collecting scenarios epitomized by various candidates. How does this work? And who is the poster child of this?
Peel: I think the poster child is probably Chris Henry. He’s a District 4 candidate, a Green Party candidate. He has run for about every single office in Oregon that’s available. He’s never received more than 5% of the vote. And this year, he received nearly all of his donations by paying a 501(c)(4) organization called the Portland Clean Air Fund, which is very easy to confuse with the Portland Clean Energy Fund – it’s not at all the same thing. But Chris Henry paid this organization quite a bit of money to basically go out across the city and collect donations for him. They were nearly all $5 donations. And records show that in a two month span, only 11% of Chris Henry’s donations that he received were actually from within his district. Most of his support actually came from the three districts that he is not running to represent. And he ended up unlocking $38,000 in taxpayer funds, again, primarily through this paid canvassing group.
Miller: And is it the same situation where it’s legal under the city’s rules to pay an organization to get contributors that can then unlock public financing?
Peel: It is, the city’s program has no rules against that. When I reached out to the program about this, the director Susan Mottet said organizations play a strong role in basically democracy, in our elections. So kind of defending Portland Clean Air Fund’s work.
This nonprofit has really caused a lot of discomfort among some city council candidates who felt like it was kind of the cheap route to go – “If I can pay this canvassing group $20 per hour and they get me one $10 donation, that $10 donation becomes $100. So I’m actually getting enough bang for my buck.” I think that created a lot of discomfort amongst candidates … like, this is not what these taxpayer dollars were supposed to do.
Miller: Just to take a step back here, you point out in some of your recent reporting that Portland is actually on its second version of a public campaign financing system. What happened with the first one?
Peel: So the first iteration of public financing in Portland was in 2006. It was a program called Voter-Owned Elections. There were definitely some similarities between the two. But it sort of got torpedoed after a candidate in 2006, named Emilie Boyles, spent thousands of dollars paying her daughter to effectively make Google searches, and also after her campaign manager was convicted of forging qualifying signatures.
So four years later, Portland voters repealed the program. And then it wasn’t until six years later that the city council decided to sort of take another go at public financing, with some tweaks to be sure.
Miller: That was in 2016. You pointed out in some of your recent reporting that at that point, when they were ready to consider reinstituting some version of public campaign financing, that they considered what was a then new program in Seattle. How does Seattle’s program work?
Peel: Seattle’s program, there are some similarities – candidates in both of the city’s programs do have to qualify by getting a certain number of donations. In Seattle’s program though, a city council person in Seattle that is running in one of the districts has to receive 150 donations and 150 signatures. And 75 of those have to be from within their district. So they really have to show that they have support among the constituents that they are seeking to represent. It’s also not a matching program. They give four $25 vouchers to every single registered voter across the city. And then with those four vouchers, any individual can basically say “OK, I want two of them to go to candidate A, one to go to candidate B and I want my fourth one to go to candidate C.” They assign those $25 vouchers and that’s that. The money doesn’t change once it gets to the city, it doesn’t get matched. $25 is $25.
One of the biggest things that really piqued my curiosity about the Seattle program is that they have the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission. Portland has an elections commission as well, but the Seattle commission has a lot of regulatory authority. They can launch investigations, they can impose really stiff civil penalties. They’re fearsome. Candidates are a little paranoid, they know they have to follow the program rules or else this commission can come down really hard on them. Portland’s commission, by contrast, it’s sort of toothless, it doesn’t have any regulatory power. It’s very much just an advisory committee.
Miller: So, as you mentioned, Portland scrapped its first public campaign financing system because of a well publicized abuse of that system … an abuse that, it’s worth just underlining here, is different than the kinds of spirit-of-the-law skirting ways that we’ve been talking about. But do you have an idea right now for how the new council members, some of whom benefited from this current system, might be interested or not interested in tweaking this current system?
Peel: I think in talking to candidates – and not just the ones that were actually elected, but some of them, too – I think there were a lot of hard feelings about the program. But the hard feelings were not of one flavor. I know there were a number of candidates that were upset that the program took a long time sometimes to actually deposit the matching funds into candidates’ campaign accounts, which meant that they had very little time to actually campaign with that money. There was certainly some discontent about paid canvassers collecting a lot of money for candidates, especially when the program’s amount of money that it could spread across candidates was so thin already. They felt like some candidates were sort of able to hack the system and there were no safeguards around those taxpayer dollars.
There are candidates – among them, some of the 12 that are going to be our new city council – I think that were unhappy with the program to some extent. I don’t know how much of an appetite there is to actually change the program. I think many people would argue, and I think I would argue this too, that the city probably has bigger fish to fry than tweaking its public campaign financing system. That’s not one of Portlanders’ top concerns right now, which I think is definitely understandable. And I think, too, people are still very stuck with “look, this was a well intentioned system.” It does allow for some candidates to really receive grassroots support that they otherwise wouldn’t. So, I think there is a sort of trepidation around, oh gosh, how much do we want to criticize this program that helps me get elected and is known as a Portland progressive policy? I’m not sure how strong the appetite is for changing this right now.
Miller: Sophie, thanks very much.
Peel: Thank you for having me.
Miller: Sophie Peel covers city politics for Willamette Week.
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