Republican Sen. Martha McSally, who has a history of campaign finance irregularities, reported refunding $120,000 in donations this week after the FEC flagged more than 50 contributors who gave more to McSally than federal law allows. This sort of thing is, well, a thing with McSally, a Republican who was appointed to the Senate in 2018 following two terms in the House (and a losing Senate last year):
- In an FEC report she filed early in 2015 as a member of the House, McSally reported raising $5 million over the previous six months—a flat-out impossible sum that, several days after the mistake was pointed out, she amended down to $1.7 million.
- In 2016, she refiled an astounding 26 fundraising reports to correct years’ worth of errors—including $42,600 in excess contributions.
- And last year, in a rare audit, the FEC determined McSally's 2014 campaign was riddled with problems, including failures to disclose required information like donor employer names—and, guess what? $319,000 in excess contributions.
When McSally had to refile all those reports in 2016, the editorial board of the conservative Arizona Republic—which had endorsed her successful bid to enter Congress in 2014—opined, "It is reaching the point that it is difficult to ascribe the word 'error' to her reports; this many failures begins to look intentional." Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of "errors" later, it sure does seem like a feature rather than a bug.