A political organization founded by Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig aiming to clean up money in politics has been asked to clean up its own campaign finance records.
The Federal Election Commission sent the Mayday super PAC four letters, most recently on Jan. 25, seeking more information about the group’s quarterly reports in which donations and expenditures did not appear either to add up or to comply with federal law.
Lessig said the problem was a computer glitch between his group’s vendor and the commission where dates of transactions were input in the wrong format.
“There was no data that wasn’t there. It was just because the way the computer system processed it, it wasn’t in a way that the FEC computer could understand, and we have corrected it,” Lessig said.
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Letters from the commission seeking more information from political committees are quite common, according to Paul S. Ryan, a lawyer at the Campaign Legal Center in Washington.
“A letter like this is not a big deal,” said Ryan. “To hear of errors like this one is not highly unusual in cases where we are talking about thousands of individual donations coming in and a lot going out. There are going to be some questions that arise.”
He added: “Issues like this are a good thing because it shows the FEC is doing its job.”
But to advocates for less campaign finance regulation, the commission inquiries into Mayday are ironic.
“If more speech regulation is such a good idea, then how come a Harvard Law professor with a multimillion-dollar budget can’t follow the laws that exist now?” said David Keating, president of the Center for Competitive Politics.
Mayday was founded last year with the premise of being “the super PAC to end all super PACs.” The group raised $10 million for the 2014 midterm elections, but lost six of the eight races it was involved in.
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The group said that in its 2014 year-end reports, which were due Saturday, all problems with earlier reports would be fixed.
James Pindell can be reached at James.Pindell@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jamespindell.