A new campaign finance study found a large portion of contributions to campaigns of legislative candidates went unreported in 2016.
Dr. Nicholas Barouth is managing director of the Upper Midwest Regional Center on Public Policy at North Dakota State University. He says a loophole in the state's campaign finance law allows some contributions to remain undisclosed - any contribution $200 or less does not need to be reported. 38 percent of contributions during the 2016 campaign were labeled " no reportable contributions for reporting period. Barouth says this creates an issue.
"What I'm interested in, and what the Policy Center is interested in, is greater transparency so we know who's giving money to our legislators and we know how much is a significant amount. The smaller campaign contributions - we don't even get an aggregate amount, we don't even know how much there is. We just know people who contribute more than $200. So it leaves us out of the game - we don't quite know what's going on, is the perspective I get from doing this report."
Barouth says this is not the first time a large disparity in reported campaign contributions was found. He says the Center has done similar studies on campaigns from 2010 to 2015 - but so far, nothing's being done about it.
"You know, the idea that you can poke the bear - I mean, that's fine and good, but then nothing happens. So it's kind of a frustration. The thing I tell myself is, well, you want a record; you want to make sure the information is available for when something happens, then we are ready and we know what the issues are. One of the things about transparency is that when it's not available, you want to make people recognize this - that we are missing out the full picture and that we can't really get a good sense of how our political system's working if certain parts of it are shut off from us."
Because of the reporting requirements, Barouth says it's unclear whether or not small contributions make up a significant portion of total contributions to legislative campaigns.