Details Emerge on Campaign Finance Complaint; Draheim Denounces Chamber's Actions

Image crop of the email complaint made on Thursday evening

More details have emerged today on Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum’s forwarding onto the state a complaint against East Lansing City Council candidate Erik Altmann. The allegation is that Altmann violated campaign finance law because the letter he sent out responding to attack ads by the Lansing Regional Chamber of Commerce asked people to also vote for Mark Meadows and Steve Ross.

Byrum received the complaint by email on Thursday, October 29, at 6:23 p.m. The message was short, referring to Altmann’s letter and claiming a “blatant violation” on the part of Altmann for recommending votes for Meadows and Ross.

By noon on Friday, Byrum had sent to the State her own letter. In that, Byrum provided a much more specific case against Altmann—and also Meadows and Ross—specifying how precisely she thought their campaigns might have broken the law.

Byrum suggested in her letter to the state that the Ross and Meadows campaigns might have violated the law by inappropriately “accepting” a “contribution” (in the form of the mailer) from Altmann.

Byrum’s message to the candidates refers to an investigation by her, but Meadows told me he’s not sure “what ‘investigation’ she conducted since she sure didn’t contact me to ask about it.”

Ross said his experience was the same: “No questions asked. No notification of any sort of ongoing investigation that was occurring. No chance to respond.”

Altmann says the same: “The clerk did not contact me as part of any investigation. The first I learned of this complaint was when the clerk sent me the letter she apparently had already sent to state election officials.”

Byrum told the three she would not identify the complainant because “I have not made it a practice to release the names of individuals who files [sic] complaints [with] my office.” She did provide them the email complaint with the name redacted. (Meadows provided it to us.)

She said it was her own professional decision to “forward that complaint to the Secretary of State” (along with her own letter). As we reported several days ago, Byrum did not forward to the State a complaint about the Chamber’s attack ads, because she determined that by not using terms like “vote for” or “vote against,” the mailers counted as “educational” and so not subject to campaign finance restrictions. (We also reported we think her reading of the law is correct in that instance.)

I asked Byrum this morning, by email, to answer several questions, including of what her investigation consisted and whether she sees any conflict of interest between her role here and her role as an endorser of Shanna Draheim's campaign and a financial supporter of Nathan Triplett's campaign, given that Altmann, Meadows, Ross, Draheim, and Triplett (as well as Jermaine Ruffin) are all competing for three open seats.

Byrum has not yet responded. (Note that today is Saturday, not a business day.)

Councilmember Ruth Beier, who has endorsed Meadows, Altmann, and Ross, issued a statement today, objecting “to the idea that “the ‘news’ is that Mr. Altmann does not know his campaign finance law, rather than the fact that business interests have bombarded East Lansing residents with offensive flyers and outright lies every day this week to protect their tax give-aways.”

Today, Draheim publicly denounced the actions of the Chamber in terms of the negative mailers, saying on her campaign’s Facebook page, “I don’t appreciate—in any way, shape or form—the Chamber’s recent actions in the East Lansing City Council campaign. I don’t like it. I don’t welcome it. I didn’t ask for it. I can’t imagine anything good coming from it.”

She concluded that, “The voters in this upcoming election deserve better than what the various third-party voices in this campaign have served up. Frankly, the six of us running for City Council do too.”