Perhaps the consultants are marking up the cost. Charging the campaigns a larger amount than they actually spend. Perhaps the Mayor et al were hoodwinked by old fashioned embezzlement. Good to know our city coffers are being kept by such responsible and detail oriented minds.

How the hell do you confuse $54000 with $3400? I wish I had the kind of money I could sling it around like that.

Eli. You’re embarrassing yourself at this point.

No one cares.
The differences are easily explainable in many non nefarious ways.
No one cares.

It seems worth following up on to me. Are campaigns funding ad buys for other campaigns or issue ads that don't link back to the campaign site? Or are multiple parties funding campaign ads? Either could point to campaign finance irregularities which could be news. Or, maybe the accounting is just really sloppy, but that doesn't seem plausible when disclosure is required.

ROTFL! The liberal mind really is a one track mind that can’t see the forest for the trees, isn’t it?

@1, @4: Perhaps the very human beings who punched the data into Excel put the expenditure from “People for [the Candidate]” in the column titled “[the Candidate]”. Sometimes they went the other way. Random errors need not cancel out. Sometimes the very human beings worked very long days, late in the campaign.

In other words, what @3 tried to tell you.

Furthermore, your well-funded and self-funded candidate, Cary Moon, lost by over ten percentage points. To someone who’d never previously run for office. Console yourself with all of the “suspicious” (not really) accounting errors you want, but a loss of that magnitude wasn’t rooted in Google ad buys. Or any ad buys. (Heck, Moon’s imminent loss was so obviously inevitable, The Stranger started finger-pointing during the week before Election Day.)

@6 You are very much missing the point that the numbers were not reported correctly as they should have been. Also, it is a bit much to think that everyone just happened to make errors making the same reports. If the google numbers are right then there is more money in the system than was reported.

@8: You are very much missing the point that I speculated as to why the numbers were not reported correctly as they should have been.

“Also, it is a bit much to think that everyone just happened to make errors making the same reports.”

Although the piece starts with a reference to the state’s reporting requirements, which were established a long time ago and with which political campaigns are very familiar, all the supposed violations are actually against Seattle’s reporting requirements, which are new and different. Lack of experience is likely a factor here.

“If the google numbers are right then there is more money in the system than was reported.”

And if Google’s numbers are wrong, then the opposite is true. But that doesn’t salve your lingering butthurt over Moon’s defeat, now does it?

Moon lost. By a lot. To a newbie. Get over it.

Of course what "tensor" is describing is more popularly known as "cooking the books"... LOL

@9: Got any evidence for intentional wrongdoing? Send it to the SEEC.

(Crickets...)

Durkan beat Moon. Last year. Get over it.