{ "id": "1999-julyaugust-campaign-finance-kiddie-donors", "slug": "1999-julyaugust-campaign-finance-kiddie-donors", "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1999-julyaugust-campaign-finance-kiddie-donors.html", "year": 1999, "month": "July/August", "monthNum": 7, "headline": "CAMPAIGN FINANCE: Kiddie donors", "kicker": "CAMPAIGN FINANCE", "author_name": "Alan C. Miller", "author_title": "", "affiliation": "Los Angeles Times", "summary": "Young teenagers are making large political donations to federal candidates, raising suspicions that wealthy parents are using their children to circumvent campaign contribution limits. Researchers analyzed nearly 9,000 student donations totaling $7.5 million between 1991 and 1998 to investigate the extent of this potentially illegal practice.", "keywords": [ "donations", "minors", "loophole" ], "topics": [ "Government & Politics", "Investigative Methods", "Data & Databases" ], "technologies": [], "full_text": "They are the most precocious of political donors: youngsters who are not old enough to drive a car, never mind cast a vote, yet they dispense $1,000 checks to candidates for public office. The suspicion, of course, is that these school-age donors are the beneficiaries of a generous onetime boost in their allowance from parents looking to circumvent federal contribution limits. At $1,000 per election, family bundles are a tempting - and potentially illegal - way for wealthy givers to double or triple their largess to a favored candidate. Federal law places no minimum age on donors but requires that the funds be \"owned or controlled exclusively by contributors\" and that they \"give knowingly and voluntarily.\"\n\nConsultant helps\n\nOur curiosity about the extent of this practice was piqued by contributions from three students in a single family to a U.S. Senate candidate from California in 1998. So, we retained independent researcher Dwight Morris and his Campaign Study Group in Virginia, to provide a definitive set of numbers on federal contributions and a road map for further reporting.\n\nThe FEC regards student giving as such a potentially serious loophole that it has repeatedly urged Congress to ban donations by minors.\n\nStarting with the Federal Election Commission records of contributions of $200 or more between Jan. 1, 1991 and Dec. 31, 1998 - a total of 3.9 million donations - Morris searched for donations to federal candidates or party committees by those identified as \"students.\"\n\nHe then scrubbed the initial hits to locate additional money from those identified as students for some contributions but not others (donations often include no information listed for occupation).\n\nConversely, he eliminated other donors who were listed as students but who proved to be housewives taking a college course or professionals who had gone back to school.\n\nThe tally: 8,876 student donations totaling $7.5 million. And the trend lines showed the numbers were growing.\n\nUsing this database, Morris compiled a list of major student donors, including many of the 163 who gave a total of $5,000 or more. This was our starting point.\n\nSince the FEC does not list ages, we had to learn more about these donors to determine whether they were law school students who might be contributing themselves or preadolescents whose largess was less likely to be their own.\n\nOur strategy was to eliminate the older students through public records before approaching them and their parents.\n\nProfiling givers\n\nUsing online newspaper searches and voting and motor vehicle records, we built files on the top 50 donors who gave $13,700 to $93,250 each. This included a 15-year-old who donated $20,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.\n\nBut we still needed more truly young givers that we believed were out there.\n\nWe then focused on students who gave smaller sums and were therefore more likely to include youngsters in affluent California counties.\n\nThrough the FEC records, we identified those whose donations in recent election cycles came at about the same time that their parents gave the legal maximum to the same candidate. We then eliminated those who were eligible to vote by checking their names with county registrars of voters.\n\nUnderage donating\n\nThe final step was to nail down a specific age for those not registered to vote or licensed to drive.\n\nHere, we found a wide disparity in the national public availability of birth records. Fortunately, we were able to access them in Los Angeles County.\n\nDr. Scott Stolnitz, a Marina del Rey dentist, initially told me he wanted nothing to do with our story. When I subsequently called back to say that his daughter was going to be prominently featured, he said, \"You know nothing about my daughter.\"\n\nI replied that I knew she was 10 years old when she gave $1,000 to Republican presidential candidate Lamar Alexander the same day that both her parents also gave the maximum.\n\n\"OK,\" he said, \"Here's the story.\" (Which turned out to be that he decided to make the contribution on his daughter's behalf from a checking account that he funds.) With our cases in hand, further reporting revealed that the FEC regards student giving as such a potentially serious loophole that it has repeatedly urged Congress to ban donations by minors, based on the presumption that contributors below age 16 are not making contributions on their own behalf. Yet, since 1975, the oft-criticized watchdog has assessed just one fine arising from minors' donations.\n\nAlan Miller can be reached by e-mail at alan.miller@latimes.com", "provenance": { "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6", "extracted_at": "2026-07-05", "verified": true }, "similar": [ { "slug": "1996-january-from-page-four-linking-contributions", "score": 0.236 }, { "slug": "1992-november-bush-holds-big-lead-in-corporate-donations", "score": 0.231 }, { "slug": "1992-july-politics-power-and-pcs", "score": 0.201 }, { "slug": "1993-march-orange-county-register-settles-the-score-on-soft-money-contributions", "score": 0.2 }, { "slug": "1999-december-bundling-bucks", "score": 0.194 } ], "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1999-julyaugust-campaign-finance-kiddie-donors.html", "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1999-julyaugust-campaign-finance-kiddie-donors.json" }