Limits and the Person They Are Attributed To

A contribution limit is a ceiling on what one person may give to one recipient for one election. Each of those three variables is defined by rule, and errors in campaign finance far more often arise from misidentifying the person or the election than from arithmetic. The statute sets the ceilings; the regulations decide who is standing under them.

How the Ceilings Are Set and Adjusted

The limits appear in the statute as figures tied to contributor type and recipient type: what an individual may give a candidate committee, what a multicandidate committee may give, what a party committee may give, and what a person may give a party or a non-candidate committee. The statute does not leave every figure static. It directs that specified amounts be increased in proportion to the change in a price index measured against a fixed base period, with the resulting figures published by the Commission.

The indexing instruction does not reach every limit. Several ceilings were enacted as fixed numbers with no adjustment clause and therefore stay where the statute put them, however far the index moves. The practical result is a published schedule with two kinds of entry side by side, and a figure quoted from an outdated schedule is unreliable for the indexed rows and reliable for the fixed ones. The safe practice is to read the current schedule rather than to carry a number forward.

Each Election Counts Separately

Federal limits run per election, and the primary and the general are separate elections. So is a runoff, a special election and, where one occurs, a convention or caucus that has the effect of nominating. A contributor may therefore give the full amount for each election in which the candidate participates. A contribution is presumed to apply to the next election unless the contributor designates otherwise in writing, and the designation controls how the receipt is recorded and reported.

The structure creates two recurring problems. The first is money designated for an election the candidate never reaches, which cannot simply be kept and must be refunded or redesignated. The second is money received after an election that exceeds the net debts outstanding from it. Both are treated as excessive receipts subject to the cure described in the procedure for refunding, redesignating or reattributing, and both are visible on the face of a report to anyone reconciling designations against election dates.

Attribution Between Persons

The harder question is whose limit a payment consumes. A check drawn on an individual account is attributed to that individual. A check drawn on a joint account held by two people is attributed to the account holder who signs it, unless the contributors provide a written instruction, signed by each, allocating the amount between them. Absent that instruction the entire amount lands on one limit, which is how a payment intended as two contributions becomes one excessive one.

Designation works alongside attribution and is often confused with it. Attribution answers who gave; designation answers which election the money is for. A contributor may do both in one instruction, naming the election and, on a joint account, the split between holders. Where the instruction is silent on either point the default rules fill the gap, and the defaults are unforgiving: the next election, and the signer alone. Committees that solicit without a designation line on the response device inherit those defaults by omission.

Contributions that pass through an intermediary carry a further rule. Money earmarked or otherwise directed to a clearly identified candidate through a conduit is attributed to the original contributor for limit purposes, and the conduit must report the arrangement so that the chain is visible. The intermediary's own limit is not consumed unless the intermediary exercised direction or control over the choice of recipient, in which case the amount counts against both.

Affiliation Collapses Separate Committees Into One

Committees that are established, financed, maintained or controlled by the same person, corporation, labor organization or group share a single limit rather than each holding a separate one. Affiliation is presumed within a corporate family and between a national organization and its subordinate units, and it can be found elsewhere on a multi-factor inquiry into common ownership, overlapping officers, shared facilities and the practical direction of committee decisions. Separate incorporation and separate bank accounts do not defeat it.

The consequence is arithmetic rather than conceptual. Three affiliated committees giving the maximum each have given three times the permitted amount, and the excess is attributable across the group. Whether a group of committees is affiliated in the first place frequently turns on the same control facts that determine whether an organization has crossed into committee status at all, an issue treated in the tests that trigger political committee registration.

What the Limits Do Not Reach

Limits attach to contributions. They do not attach to spending that is not a contribution, and the boundary between the two is the coordination question. Money spent on a communication that is coordinated with a candidate is treated as an in-kind contribution and is capped accordingly; money spent independently is not a contribution and falls outside the ceilings, though it carries its own reporting and disclaimer obligations. The dividing standards are set out in the content, conduct and payment prongs, and the reporting duties that follow independence are described in the treatment of independent expenditures.

A candidate's own funds are also outside the contributor limits when spent on the candidate's own campaign, though the amount and its form must be reported. Transfers between authorized committees of the same candidate are unlimited, as are certain transfers among party committees. Each of these carves an exception into the ceiling structure rather than modifying it, and each has its own definitional boundary that must be satisfied before the exception applies.