Erie County Democratic Chairman Jeremy J. Zellner acknowledges that his committee’s campaign finance records are a mess.“Clerical errors,” he explains, adding that painstaking efforts to correct years’ worth of duplications, unreported contributions, unrecorded expenses and inputting mistakes are now underway.
But that’s not how a pair of party dissidents view it.
James J. Eagan and Rich Horner, critics of Zellner’s leadership, claim the sheer volume of six or seven years of mistakes that they uncovered constitute either “gross incompetence or malfeasance.” They say party leaders should demand that an independent auditor examine the party books to determine if any money is missing.
If the Erie County Board of Elections fails to refer the problem to its state counterpart for investigation, they promise to demand one themselves. They claim that contributions of almost $200,000 were not reported (including one for $25,000), that $55,000 in loans disappeared as a liability to paint a rosy picture of party finances, and that the party never documented transfers between various internal accounts. Their review of the books indicate there were 2,213 contributions and 869 expenditures previously not reported.