Abduallah Failed To Comply With Campaign Finance Law

City-County Councilor Patrice Abduallah (D) shamelessly violated campaign finance laws which require municipal candidates to file reports disclosing the source of their campaign contributions and how they spent those funds when he first sought election to the Indianapolis city-county council in 2003. According to the reports he filed with the Marion Co. Election Board, he received $10,300 in contributions and expended $9,243.50 during the 2003 election cycle. Beyond that, it is difficult to make heads or tails out of reports which were sloppily and improperly prepared. But what can be discerned from them is very troubling.

Abduallah claimed as his single, largest contribution a $3,450 receipt from the Greater Indianapolis Progress Committee, which is actually a municipally-run nonprofit organization barred from making political contributions. It appears the report should have identified the source as the Greater Islamic Progress Committee, which his amended report later identified as making a $300 contribution, along with a number of other individuals with Muslim surnames. Abduallah appeared to be deliberately misrepresenting the true source of his campaign receipts.

His reports also showed he received over $6,000 in loans from two individuals, including Nellye Matthews and Don Bardon, in addition to several individual contributions from Colts' owner Jim Irsay, Nellye Matthews and Ron Gibson. For his expenditures, he identified numerous small purchases from restaurants, drug stores and grocery stores. These expenditures created the impression Abduallah was using campaign funds for personal expenditures. One expenditure was represented as a food purchase for campaign workers from a CVS store.

Brad Klopfenstein, who ran against Aduallah in 2003 as a Libertarian candidate, filed a complaint against Abduallah with the Marion Co. Election Board after he discovered numerous discrepancies in his reporting. "The numbers never added up even after he filed an amended report," Klopfenstein told AI. The minutes of a March 23, 2004 meeting of the Board indicate that the Board took up Klopfenstein's complaint after twice tabling it. Klopfenstein complained that Abuallah made no attempt to amend his reports until after the election was over. The Board treated the complaint as a "defective report." An attorney for Abduallah insisted that he had worked hard on trying to come into compliance with the law by filing amended reports. The Board unanimously agreed to slap Abduallah on the hand by issuing him a mere $100 fine.

Klopfenstein found the Board's treatment of Abduallah's violation of the campaign finance laws disillusioning. He said then-election administrator Robert Vane tried to dissuade him from pursuing the complaint. Only then-Board chairman Candace Marendt showed any interest in acting upon his complaint. It is rather pointless to have the law if the Election Board is willing to overlook such brazen violations in the campaign finance reporting requirements. Klopfenstein was particularly disappointed in the media's lack of concern that a city-county councilor had misrepresented his campaign finance reporting. If you examine Abduallah's reports, you can't help but conclude that a 10-year-old could have done a better job preparing the reports. The fact is they remain incorrect to this very day, even after the Board fined Abduallah.