City Council candidate calls for opponent to prove donor info following RTD report

The three-way campaign for Richmond’s 6th District City Council seat was thrown into turmoil Saturday as one candidate called for his opponent to prove he’s been filing truthful campaign finance reports after an article by the Richmond Times-Dispatch raised doubts about their accuracy.

In a story published Saturday morning, the Times-Dispatch revealed that five purported donors to council candidate Tavares Floyd say they didn’t give Floyd money despite Floyd’s campaign filing paperwork saying they did. 

Floyd, a former aide to incumbent City Councilor Ellen Robertson, is now running to unseat her and directly attacking her as an ineffective leader.

Business owner Wille Hilliard, the third candidate in the race, called the report about Floyd’s campaign finances “incredibly concerning.”

“I am calling on the Floyd campaign to publish financial records and validate that his donations are not fabricated as quickly as possible,” Hilliard said in a statement Saturday morning.

Floyd did not offer a detailed rebuttal to the paper on the allegations of false information on his campaign finance reports. Instead he issued a legal threat to the Times-Dispatch suggesting its report might contain “misleading, skewed, or defamatory content,” according to the newspaper.

The Times-Dispatch named five people who said they didn’t give money to Floyd despite appearing as donors in his campaign finance paperwork. Several gave on-the-record statements to the paper, including an assistant attorney general in Maryland who said she went to college with Floyd but was “kind of pissed off” to discover he listed her as a $1,000 donor.

Floyd did not immediately respond Saturday to a request for comment from The Richmonder. As of mid-day, he had not addressed the matter publicly apart from the legal threat reported by the Times-Dispatch.

Robertson also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Under Virginia law, campaign finance violations can bring civil fines. Putting deliberately false information on campaign finance forms can bring felony charges, according to state law.

The allegations about Floyd’s paperwork highlight the loose enforcement of Virginia’s campaign finance laws. Candidates for office have to file reports showing where they’re getting money from and how they’re spending it, but they don’t have to file supporting documentation like receipts or check stubs proving the information is accurate.

Floyd has reported raising more than $140,000 for his campaign, a remarkably high sum for a council race that’s well above the $73,881 Robertson reported raising and the $16,849 Hilliard reported. Because the media, donors and voters often look to those numbers as a metric for who’s running the strongest campaign, candidates have an incentive to try to deliver a bigger number than their opponents.

Some of Floyd’s expenditures also appear unusually high for a council race. For example, in late June he reported spending more than $36,000 on services from “Atlanta Digital Marketing Agency.” His report described the services purchased as “Buyer - digital.” That single reported expenditure was worth more than what some City Council incumbents have raised this year for their entire campaigns.

The only official system in place for verifying the accuracy of campaign finance reports is randomized campaign finance reviews conducted by the Virginia Department of Elections. As part of that process, state officials are authorized to request financial records to compare the amount of money reported to the money in the campaign’s account.

In his statement, Hilliard called Virginia’s campaign finance laws “extremely weak.”

“There is essentially no enforcement,” he said. “Candidates are able to easily under-report donations to hide donors and over-report to inflate the perceived momentum of their campaign.”

Hilliard said that if Richmond residents can’t trust that local campaigns are being run honestly, “they won’t trust that council can run an honest city government.”

“In the next General Assembly session, the legislature must strengthen our laws,” he said. “In the meantime, it is vital that candidates run clean and transparent campaigns.”

In an interview earlier this year with the local news site South Richmond News, Floyd was asked about his surprisingly strong fundraising abilities. He attributed it to his ability to create a “rapport” with people he’s met in his life.

“When your script is already written, things will always happen the way that they’re supposed to happen,” he said.