Kalamazoo Times

The Kalamazoo County GOP Chair has requested that County Clerk Tim Snow upload more finance reports, claiming that some are missing, the Kalamazoo County GOP reported.

The GOP reported that local candidate reports were due to be submitted July 24 and that only one report had been uploaded, which gave an unfair advantage to the deputy clerk, Sarah Joshi. 

Chairman Scott McGraw explained that this lack of transparency was not an option. 

“Transparency and public integrity should not be sacrificed in the middle of a pandemic,” McGraw told Kalamazoo County GOP. “There is a brief window in which the public is able to scrutinize these reports before the August 4 election, so it is imperative that these reports are uploaded to the county website expediently."

McGraw explained that the failure of Snow to upload these files could severely harm the ability of Joshi's opponent to react in a timely manner before elections. 

“Candidates plan last-minute strategies based on these reports, so Snow’s office is hindering some of the basic functions of our democracy through this delay,” McGraw said. “The whole point of putting campaign finance reports online is that these reports could be accessed instantaneously — that is not the case.”

McGraw was upset by the fact that the clerk's office did not open to receive the reports or to state when they had received them, which resulted in a great deal of uncertainty. 

“There was just a bin set outside the clerk’s office to receive reports; no one from the clerk’s office was time-stamping these reports, so we have no way of knowing exactly when reports were received,” McGraw told Kalamazoo County Republican Party. 

McGraw is requesting that Snow make immediate changes to the way in which finance reports are received, reported and uploaded to prevent such an incident from taking place again.