On Monday, Joe Biden’s presidential campaign fund, “Biden for President” changed its name to “Harris for President,” after he stepped down and endorsed the Vice President, Kamala Harris, as the new Democratic candidate. While most in the Democratic establishment appear to be on board, the Trump campaign has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commision (FEC) to try to block the Biden campaign from passing its $91.5 million to Harris. The issue here is whether this constitutes a campaign donation, in which case it would be a shockingly large donation. Most experts seem to believe that the transfer is kosher, since she was on the Biden campaign’s ticket. In the meantime however, the FEC’s website is confused.
If you visit the website’s top-level raising page, you may be surprised to see that the Democrats are dramatically outpacing the Republicans. There is precedent for this. According to the FEC, Democrats have out-raised Republicans in every presidential race since 2000. In 2020, Democrats out-raised Republicans more than 3 to 1, largely because Mike Bloomberg spent over a million of his own dollars to win American Samoa. Nevertheless, something is wrong with these numbers. Setting aside the recent high fundraising events that Trump has had (his conviction, a near assassination, and the Republican national convention), the Republicans had a primary earlier in the year. That means lots of fundraising for various candidates, and these numbers reflect totals for all candidates that ran in the Republican primary. Biden’s biggest challenger in the primaries was “Uncommitted”. Keep in mind, the donation surge that Harris received this week won’t be reported until the end of the month, so any boost from Biden leaving the race and endorsing Harris won’t be included. The Republican numbers should be, and in fact are, higher at this point in the race.
If you look at the table below, you can see the fundraising totals for each individual candidate (except Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who converted his principal campaign committee into a political action committee). The FEC seems to know that Harris is in the race, but not that Biden has dropped out. According to the table, both candidates lead Trump in fundraising, with Biden slightly ahead of Harris. If you dig deeper into the candidate pages for Biden and Harris, you’ll see that they both have “Harris for President'' listed under their committees (and Harris still has her 2020 committee listed, which also seems odd). This data only included contributions reported up until the end of June, so “Harris for President” didn’t exist when they were made. The FEC seems to have double-counted Biden’s war chest, including the nearly $300 million raised in Biden’s fundraising numbers as well as Harris’. I confirmed this on the “Harris for President” committee page: the page lists both Biden and Harris as authorizing candidates.
Any time you work with data, you have to watch out for double-counting: when you slice data in different ways, sometimes the same bit of data ends up in two. If you sum those buckets back up, you’ve counted it twice. For example, let’s say there are 12 dog owners and 6 cat owners in my apartment building. That means there are 18 pet owners in the building, right? Unless any of them own both a dog and a cat, in which case I have double-counted them. In this case, instead of a dog and a cat, we’re talking about almost $300 million. The FEC’s database has that money assigned to Biden, but also to Harris. Obviously the FEC hasn’t done this intentionally. Nobody types out these numbers on this page. They update automatically in response to new data that is entered: in this case, the renaming of the “Biden for President” committee to the “Harris for President” committee. In software, this is what’s known as an edge case, a rare circumstance that could cause unusual behavior in the code.
There are other minor issues on the FEC’s data display system. For example, Biden’s overall receipts are about $12 million higher than Harris’. Seems odd since, again, the underlying data for both of them should be identical. On closer inspection, only contributions made from the 2023-2024 cycle were reclassified as Harris contributions. The $12 million pf contributions made to Biden in 2020-2021 are not double-counted, and are still listed under “Biden for President”.
Another one: The number of total receipts for 2023-2024 listed for “Harris for President” is about “about 1,023,000”. If you include Harris’ 2020 campaign (still filtering for the 2023-2024 cycle), it jumps to “about 1,032,000.” But then if you remove “Harris for President” and only look at the 2020 campaign alone, of course there are no receipts. So there are 9,000 ghost receipts that exist only when you combine both of Kamala Harris’ disparate campaign contribution funds. You can see these ghosts by toggling the campaign fund on and off; a little green message will say “9,000 more results” or “9,000 fewer results.”
While I was trying to figure out where these ghost receipts were, I clicked into the details on a receipt listed for October 23rd, 2020. For some reason it wasn’t reported until the 2023-2024 cycle, which was why it ended up in this filter. This one random receipt for –$2,800 had a few details listed for the source: Nassau, Bahamas, Executive, Alameda Research. I thought, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” But sure enough, the record was linked right there: it was “wizkid”, Democratic mega-donor, and current inmate at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, Sam Bankman-Fried. The “Biden for President” committee sent this money to the “Biden Victory Fund”, which logged it as a “Return of Contribution from Sam Bankman-Fried”. The Biden Victory Fund did return a $50,000 contribution made by Bankman-Fried in 2020, but it looks like they held onto the $2,800 contribution.
When I reached out to the FEC Press Office, they directed me toward the presidential fundraising map, which doesn’t have the double-counting issue, and promised to contact their IT department. As a former developer, I’m sympathetic. These kinds of bugs crop up all the time. You try to catch them early in testing, but stuff sometimes sneaks through. As a journalist, however, it’s concerning when the government puts out bad information, intentionally or not. After all, like the banner at the top of the page says, this is “an official website of the United States government.”