The State of New York in 2020 enacted a program to provide state taxpayer matching funds for certain donations to statewide and legislative candidates. The general purpose was to “level the playing field” by helping new or low resource candidates to compete with incumbents and well-funded opponents. The program became operational in 2024.
A total of 285 legislative candidates originally signed up to participate. In Western New York 14 candidates participated. A total of approximately $34 million in state money was spent on legislative campaigns in 2024.
The law and state regulations set up the rules for the system. To qualify for the matching funds, donations must be between $5 and $250. Donors must be residents of the legislative districts of the candidates. Campaign committees were offered training in how to participate. Recordkeeping was a bit more stringent than for regular campaign financial reporting.
In issuing payments to candidate committees the Public Campaign Finance Board’s (PCFB) staff made some determinations about who was eligible for the funding and how much they would receive. The matching fund amounts are scaled between $12 and $8 for every dollar of a contribution up to $250. There are limits on how much Assembly, Senate, and statewide candidates can receive. The law requires post-election audits of some committees.
Political candidates can be a quite clever bunch. There are rules and then in some cases, there are ways to take advantage of the rules. Most such things are legal, although a New York Times story last summer documented one particular legislative candidate in New York City who seemed to have gone beyond the law. There has not been much of an effort to take a deeper look at how clever some candidates may have been until recently when an Albany Times Union story got into the weeds about how the system can be manipulated.
The Times Union reported on how one candidate successfully managed to stretch some donations into large checks from the state. It was a family affair.
Ted Danz, a Republican-Conservative candidate for the State Senate last year, wrote a check for $250 to his campaign. His wife donated the same amount online. Ten family members, including two ex-wives, donated a total of $2,500 to the Danz campaign. That $3,000 in contributions made the Danz campaign eligible for $25,000 in state funds. Danz lost the election.
The Times Union reported that 58 legislative candidates contributed to their own committees to receive state matching funds. At least 113 candidates claimed matching funds related to family donations.
One such candidate was Assemblyman Patrick Chludzinski, a newly elected Republican who represents Cheektowaga and Lancaster. The Albany newspaper quoted Chludzinski saying that “his family members were ‘hardworking, middle-class’ and ‘of modest means,’ and their support should be matched like any other donor.”
The 2025-2026 state budget made some amendments to the state matching funds program that make it easier to manipulate the system. Changes include:
- Contributions to participating candidates over $250 and up to $1,050 will now have the first $250 matched by the public campaign finance program. Previously a larger donation would have made matching funds unavailable.
- Candidates participating in the program will now be allowed to keep up to $50,000 of public campaign finance money in their campaign account. Under the old rules, leftover public funds had to be returned to the state by the candidate. A candidate can now start off a subsequent election with a nice state-provided resource.
- A specific definition of when a candidate participating in the program is opposed by a competitive candidate, allowing the participating candidate to receive the maximum allowable public campaign funds.
As previously noted, the state matching funds program provides for a post-election audit system. For participating candidates it is a luck-of-the-draw system and the odds are in their favor.
This is how the PCFB explains the audit system:
- “All statewide candidates who participate in the Program, along with all others in the same race (including non-participants), will be automatically audited post-election. In addition, legislative candidates that receive more than $500,000 in public matching funds will automatically be audited post-election, along with all others in the same race (including non-participants).
- “Of the remaining participating candidates, one third will be selected by lottery to be audited. They will be chosen at random by December 15th of the applicable election year.”
The lottery system resulted in 42 State Senate and 53 Assembly candidates being selected for an audit. The published list includes Senators Pat Gallivan and April Baskins as well as Baskins’ election opponent, Jack Moretti. Gallivan had no opponent, making him ineligible for matching funds, so why he was included in the audits list is not clear.
I enquired by email to the PCFB asking how the audits of the 2024 candidates were proceeding. I was told that “post-election audits are ongoing.” That may be an understatement. The Board’s guidelines state that “audits can take up to one-and-a-half years from the relevant election, or longer if fraud or knowing and willful violations of Article 14 of the Election Law or criminal activity is suspected.”
None of this is to suggest that there has been anything illegal about how candidates work to take advantage of the matching funds program to the maximum extent possible. It does seem to indicate, however, that the system is “gameable.”
Everything seems to be about AI these days. I decided to see how Google AI explains “gaming the system.” It reports that the expression refers to “manipulating the rules of a system to gain an unfair advantage or achieve a desired outcome, often without directly breaking the rules, but potentially going against the intended spirit of the system.“
That sort of explains what is going on with public campaign financing in New York State.
The Times Union spoke with a representative of Citizen Action of New York, an organization which advocated for the program. The newspaper was told that “the money spent by the state to match candidates’ and their families’ contributions is a small fraction of the $34 million paid by the program in total and doesn’t undermine its success. ‘There is nothing to see here.’”
Yeah, right!
Bluesky @kenkruly
Twitter/X @kenkruly
Threads kenkruly
