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After the 2016 election Jill Stein began collecting donations for recount efforts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Last I read she was somewhere in the 7-10 million dollar range. All three of those states' recount efforts have been ended at various stages now.
What happens to all the money Stein raised? Was it all spent? If not, where will it go?
Jill Stein did state on her recount site that:
If we raise more than what's needed, the surplus will also go toward election integrity efforts and to promote voting system reform. This is what we did with our surplus in 2004.
In the recount FAQs page, it states:
How will you use surplus funds? If we raise more than what's needed, the surplus will also go toward election integrity efforts and to promote voting system reform. As I said in a recent Cosmopolitan magazine Q&A:
"...Money is all raised and deposited into a dedicated and segregated account. The donor list, by the way, will be made public by the Federal Election Commission and that will happen this week. The rules for donations are basically the same rules that we used to fundraise with as a political campaign: that is a maximum donation of $2,700. However, we know that the average donation is approximately $47 or $48 and that there have been over 150,000 donors.
If by some miracle there was money leftover, that money would be appropriated according to FEC guidelines, and the options, as I understand it, would be refunding the money or making a decision as to how to continue supporting election integrity efforts that can carry on the work of this campaign. And if that were to happen, what we would be actually very excited about doing is having every contributor vote on a set of options for exactly how that money would be spent so that it could be a participatory democratic process whereby the donors decide and we would use a voting system that we think should be used all the time—you rank your choices and that way we could come up with one or more options for exactly who those funds will be spent according to the wishes of the donors."
Please read a more complete description of the process here.
So, this's what she states. However, there have been people who called it a "scam", notably President-elect Donald Trump.
Some articles to check out:
If not, where will it go?
She's got a page explaining this: http://www.jill2016.com/recount_surplus
Any surplus funds will be donated to electoral reform organizations, and the amount of money that goes to each will be decided by the people who donated using an STV election.
1) We will send out a poll to each recount donor, asked them to participate in a Ranked Choice Voting process, to choose the recipients of surplus funds.
2) Donors will rank organizations in their order of preference (1st choice, 2nd choice and so on).
3) We will want to donate to multiple organizations.
...
After #Recount2016, Jill Stein would like to continue that history of donating to organizations that fight for voting justice every day, year round.
(Hopefully there will be some organizations in the list that don't promote IRV. :/)
The Green Party 2016 recount page states it has to date raised $7.3 million dollars, and provides a budget showing estimated expenses:
Here are the estimated expenses for the recount campaign:
State filing fees: up to $5.5 million
- $3.5 million in WI
- approx. $1 million in MI**
- approx. $130K in PA and rising (charged by county)Legal fees: over $1.5 million so far and rising, could go up to $3 million
Operational costs (organizers, observers, office costs, campaign staff): approx. $500K so far and rising
Media Relations/Outreach/Communications: $150K and rising, could go up to $300K
The total cost is likely to be $9-10 million.
Since $7.3M < $9M it seems unlikely any funds would be left over.
