Patrick Bell reports that Bill Sherman, Democrat candidate for King County Prosecutor, is the subject of a PDC complaint for violations during his unsuccessful primary campaign for state legislature last year. Bell comments:
it appears the charge is more than just that Sherman didn't return money. It appears that Sherman used general money for the primary - something that could be a MAJOR violation.I verified several months ago that Sherman's PDC filings were such a mess it was hard to determine the state of his accounts. He filed a number of amendments in recent weeks. I wouldn't be surprised if the mess had concealed something significant.
I'm so disillusioned.
Where's Richard Pope on this?
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at October 08, 2007 12:17 PM | Email ThisIf he were vested or wanted to run next time, well, that would be a different story. An opportunist he is.
I said this on Hague and I'll say it again, doing PDC reporting and getting it right every time is not possible. Spending general money when you lost the primary may be a simple matter of paying off your primary bills. Same thing goes with huge cash infusions (read Cantwell 1) after the general elections to pay off debt. He just may have put the dollars in the wrong column.
However, after getting a complaint filed against him and then not acting on it to correct the problem- well, that is another story that needs to be told.
Posted by: swatter on October 8, 2007 12:53 PMAs for the statement, "for his part, Satterberg has said he'll continue to run the office in Norm Maleng's non-partisan tradition." I'm left asking the question I've asked before, and that is whether a "non-partisan" tradition is sufficient when there are so many "non-partisan" actions by the PA's office that have sided against the public, such as in "non-partisan" land use matters.
Posted by: MJC on October 8, 2007 01:33 PMhttp://web.pdc.wa.gov/home/enforcement/formal/2007.aspx
The PDC is several weeks behind updating the formal investigations and dismissals on their website.
Griswold filed a complaint against myself as well, about the same time in August 2007 as the Sherman complaint. I didn't learn about it until the PDC sent me a letter dismissing it last week. A bunch of trivial nonsense, the vast majority of which would not have violated any law even if it had been true.
It is possible Griswold may have a point, if Sherman indeed received $3,000 in contributions that could have only gone to the general election, and failed to return them. It is unclear whether Griswold attached any documentation to his complaint.
In any event, this violation -- IF ANY -- seems to be of far less consequence than the multiple repeated major violations that got the King County GOP fined $40,000 in May 2007 and Jane Hague fined $9,500 in September 2007. (Did Stefan report on these fines when they happened?)
It is probably more on the magnitude of Dan Satterberg depositing a $1,500 check from the King County GOP into his personal bank account, instead of his campaign account in early June, and filing no PDC reporting of this (and also of a $1,500 campaign expense in early June) until three months later, when the error was pointed out to him.