From the LP FEC report for January, the donation described by Tuniewicz would appear to be from Robert Willis of Mendon, Massachusetts, who identified himself as the President of Alpine Computer Systems, Inc. My search of the Party’s FEC filings for 2000 report that the Party’s major donations in 2000 were $50,000, $20,000, $15,000, $10,000, and two donations of $5000. Willis’s gift thus appears to have been the second largest donation the LP received in all of 2000, an act of extraordinary generosity for which all Libertarians should be appropriately grateful. One might have expected under the circumstances here that the National Director would have been more curious about the donor and whoever had solicited the contribution.
The complete details as to how the National Party supported its candidates around the country appear in the Political Director’s report to the LNC for December 2000. For the year, the National Party made very modest donations to support candidates for local office, including $2000 to Bonnie Flickinger, $1000 each to James Dan and Cameron DeJong, $500 each to Dale Ritchey and Mary Lou Nowe, and $600 to Jim Richardson. Dan got 45% of the vote in a two-way race; Richardson got 30% of the vote in a 3-way race.
The Libertarian Party also launched a campaign for matching funds for Congressional Candidates, spending $43,000 on nine Congressional candidates. Other candidates inquired about matching funds, but by then the National Party was out of money. The campaign required that the candidate make a $5000 ad purchase, which the National Party would then match. Unfortunately for candidates, the widely-circulated announcement of the program came very late in the election cycle—a fundraising announcement reached here in October—making it nearly impossible for a typical Libertarian campaign to take advantage of the program.
Finally, in the section of his report on Ballot Access, the LPUS Political Director reports having spent $22,167.50 in the Ballot Access 2000 effort for the Carla Howell Senate campaign. Relative to the other campaigns that the LPUS supported, the support for Howell is grotesquely disproportionate. Several other anomalies are apparent in the Report.
Anomalies? The entire remainder of the Chapter in the Political Director’s report refers to efforts to put the Presidential candidate on the ballot, and efforts to qualify other candidates in order to improve the Party’s Ballot Access Status in that state. Howell was running for U.S. Senate, not President. None of our other U.S. Senate candidates received anything like $22,000 from the National Party. Three of our Senate candidates (Emerson Ellett—NJ, Michael Corliss—MI, Tim Peterson—WI) did receive $5,000 or so in matching funds. Ellet, Corliss, and Peterson got the money very much at the end of their campaigns, when the money would be least effective. Howell received her money early in the campaign, when money talks the loudest. Nor was Howell’s campaign relevant to ballot access. No matter the outcome of her effort, Massachusetts candidates would still be able to run with “Libertarian” by their ballot entry, and Massachusetts voters would still be entitled to register “Libertarian”. So why did Howell get so much money?
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