By Cory Gaines | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice
You may not have known this before, but you have the ability to accuse someone in this state of a campaign finance law violation.
You don’t have to be a witness at a trial. In fact, once you make the accusation, you are essentially out of the process. You will get notifications from the secretary of state’s office about the progress of the complaint, but you don’t do anything other than swear out a complaint.
You also don’t have to have an intimate knowledge of campaign finance law. I’m not urging you to make wild, uneducated accusations here, but you don’t need to be a lawyer or an expert. Many of the rules around campaign finance are pretty straightforward, thus finding violations doesn’t take an expert.
What it does take is your paying attention. It also takes a desire on your part to get involved in making sure that the rules are the same for everyone and, perhaps just as importantly in Colorado, that they are enforced equally.
Back in early December, I saw an article in the Colorado Sun about State Sen. Sonya Jaquez Lewis (Democrat, District 17). The main thrust of the article was about how the good senator was going to be denied state-funded aides in the coming legislative session because of what her current aides were describing as mistreatment — in November both of her current legislative aides filed workplace misconduct complaints.
There was more to the issue though. In reading the article, it became clear to me that Sen. Jaquez Lewis was also playing fast and loose with campaign money. If the allegations in the article were true, she was using campaign money for a whole host of purposes for which they’re not allowed to be used.
She allegedly used it to pay aides for bartending at a party, as well as garden work. She allegedly paid her aides to go door-to-door to campaign for a friend. If all this was indeed happening, she wasn’t reporting these kinds of expenses, neither the direct money paid nor the in-kind contributions to her friend.
In the course of paying attention to politics and writing about same, I have seen multiple times when conservatives and/or conservative groups in this state were hit with campaign finance complaints. It often feels that the same doesn’t happen in reverse.
That is, it seems as though complaints don’t go back against liberals and liberal groups. Given this, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to see that no one else filed a complaint against Sen. Jaquez Lewis, but I am.
I’m surprised that no one else seems to have noticed or cared enough to have filed a complaint of their own. This can’t be due to a lack of knowledge; I am not such a political insider that I got tipped off by someone in a darkened parking garage. I only knew about this because of an article published by an online newspaper.
That’s part of the reason for writing this. Making the system fair, holding politicians of all parties accountable, starts with people like you and I paying attention and getting involved. If you see something, check the rules. If you think it’s a violation, do a campaign finance report: write down the specific rules that you thought were violated and what evidence you have for it.
Doing so may not change things greatly. It may not even result in any official action being taken. That is not the important thing here. The important thing here is that those running things in this state (politicians and the secretary of state) see that someone’s paying attention and willing to speak up.
READ MORE OF CORY GAINES’ WORK AT THE COLORADO ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.