The Campaign: Public Disclosure of Finances

This past Monday I filed the Third Quarter-Plus Report from my campaign. The deadline was October 30th and I know it seems like I waited 'til the last minute to turn it in, but I just wanted to make sure that it was as timely as possible. Every contribution this campaign has received and every cent that I've spent on things for it is accounted for in that report. At this point I need do no more filing of reports unless I suddenly wind up getting contributions of $1000 or more between now and this coming Tuesday... in which case I have to report them within 48 hours of receipt. But like Dad said when I told him about that on Sunday night "How many of those are you expecting to get??"

I've only made one more expenditure (and have received no further contributions) since then. Earlier today I bought a half-page ad in both the Reidsville Review and the Eden Daily News for this coming Sunday. It's a special deal that they've got going for candidates this week only. It set me back $250... but like I said, that'll most likely be the very last bit of money that gets spent in this campaign.

So in case anyone's wondering about the financial end of a political campaign of this scale - and because according to law this is going to be public knowledge anyway that you can look up for yourself - I'm going to go ahead and disclose how much in contributions I received and how much I spent doing this campaign.

The official name of the campaign is the "Knight for School Board 2006 Committee". You should be able to find that if you go looking through the North Carolina Board of Elections website.

During this campaign, my committee raised $914 in contributions. Those came from personal contributions, mailed-in checks and via PayPal through the campaign website.

In terms of spending, the total expenditures of my committee has been $1,513.75. That money was used to buy everything from pens, to domain name registration for the website, to stamps, to the die-cast Death Star and TIE Fighter models used in the first commercial (both were about two bucks), to yard signs and then advertising in print and on local television... with those last few being the biggest expenditures, obviously.

And from the looks of the books, it was the advertising that was the only real big crunch on my own wallet in this thing. Everything else wound up basically getting paid for because of the kindness of the contributors. I am very thankful to each and every person who has thought that this campaign was worth supporting like this.

I'll share this with you, my friends: when I started this, I had no idea how I was going to fund something like this. I prayed about it. And I asked God that if He really wanted me to go for this like it had felt like He was leading me to do, that He would make provision for the funding of it. At the end of it, I only had to pay a few hundred bucks out of more than fifteen hundred: that sure sounds like He provided a way to me.

So this may sound like a weird thing to some people to talk about in a campaign finance report, but I'm thankful to God that He did allow for me to run a world-class campaign in my very first outing as a political candidate. And I'm thankful to everyone who believed in me enough to make a contribution to the cause. I am very, very indebted to them in gratitude for this... and will probably be feeling that toward them for the rest of my life.