League Joins Partners Asking Presidential Candidates to Disclose Bundlers

As campaigns prepare to file their latest campaign finance reports, the League has signed onto a letter along with its partners, asking candidates to publicly disclose information about bundlers. Bundlers are individuals who gather multiple contributions for the campaign and present it as a single campaign contribution. The letter, sent to both Presidential campaigns, also cited prior precedence for disclosing bundler information.

July 14, 2020

Dear Vice President Biden/President Trump:

As your campaign prepares to file its latest campaign finance report with the Federal Election Commission, we, the undersigned organizations, urge you to also publicly disclose more information about your campaign’s bundlers.

It is our understanding that, in December, your campaign identified approximately 230 bundlers who each raised at least $25,000 for your campaign during the primary. But last month, CNN reported that your campaign has not updated that bundler list since late last year.

It has long been a bipartisan tradition for presidential candidates to voluntarily disclose information about their campaign bundlers. Over the years, this voluntary practice has been routinely embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike, including President George W. Bush, President Barack Obama, Senator John McCain, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Government accountability depends on transparency in our campaign finance system, and that includes transparency about presidential campaign bundlers. That’s why we are calling on you to implement a system to regularly and meaningfully disclose information about your campaign bundlers throughout the 2020 election cycle, ideally releasing this information in tandem with all upcoming FEC reporting deadlines.

Your campaign is already required by law to regularly disclose detailed information about any federal lobbyists who bundle campaign contributions on its behalf. Implementing a robust bundler disclosure system that publicly displays information about all individuals who raise $50,000 or more for your campaign would help demonstrate your commitment to transparency. 

Such disclosures should include each bundler’s name; city, state, and ZIP code of residence; and employer and occupation — details that all campaigns are already required to report to the FEC for their campaign donors.

Moreover, these disclosures should provide meaningful information about how much money each bundler has raised for your presidential campaign, such as the exact aggregate amount they have raised to date — which can, and should, be updated regularly in the months ahead.

Additionally, we ask that you include in these bundling totals the amounts of money your bundlers raise for any joint fundraising committees that benefit your campaign and any state or national party committees. Precise fundraising disclosures are important at a time when an individual is legally allowed to contribute $620,600 to the Biden Victory  Fund joint fundraising committee.

Furthermore, we request that all of this information be made available to the public on your campaign website in a format that can be easily searched, sorted, and downloaded. 

Thank you for your consideration of this request — a request that we also made to the campaign of President Donald Trump. Should you wish to discuss this issue further, we would be happy to share our perspective and expertise with you as you develop and implement a system to disclose information about your campaign bundlers.

Sincerely,
American Promise
Business for America
Campaign Legal Center
Center for Responsive Politics
Common Cause
FixUS
Government Accountability Institute
Issue One
League of Women Voters
Liberty Coalition
MapLight
Michigan Campaign Finance Network
National Institute on Money in Politics
National Legal and Policy Center
Open the Government
Project On Government Oversight
Public Citizen
RepresentUs
Sunlight Foundation
Take Back Our Republic