Politcal Committees

Florida’s Political Committees, commonly called PCs, have become a powerful force in state and local elections. Unlike individual contributions directly to candidates, political committees can accept contributions without the same contribution limits, allowing corporations, industry groups, wealthy donors, and other political committees to contribute enormous sums of money.

The problem becomes even more serious when that money begins to move.

A corporation or industry group may contribute a large amount to one political committee. That committee can then transfer money to another committee, which may transfer funds to yet another. After several transactions, voters trying to determine who originally supplied the money can face a maze of committee names, transfers, and financial reports.

The transactions may be publicly reported, but disclosure does not necessarily equal transparency. When understanding the true source of political money requires voters to manually trace a chain of transactions through multiple committees, the system makes accountability unnecessarily difficult.

Imagine a corporation contributes $500,000 to Committee A. Committee A transfers $400,000 to Committee B. Committee B then sends $300,000 to Committee C, which uses the money to support or oppose candidates, purchase political advertising, or influence an election.

A voter looking only at Committee C's financial report may see Committee B as the source of the money, not the corporation that originally supplied it.

The money has a paper trail, but its origin can become buried beneath layers of transactions.

Critics describe this practice as a form of legal campaign-finance laundering: using lawful transfers between political committees in ways that can obscure the original source of political money from ordinary voters.

Voters deserve to know who is actually financing the political messages they see and the candidates and causes seeking their support.

When millions of dollars can travel through networks of political committees before reaching their final destination, voters may know where the money came from last without knowing where it came from first.

Come Clean Florida believes transparency should mean more than making financial reports available. It should mean making political money easy to follow, easy to understand, and easy to trace back to its original source.

Florida voters shouldn't need to become forensic accountants to follow the money.