Clarification: This article was updated on July 23, 2024 at 3:58 p.m. to clarify how Georgia’s two main political parties qualify candidates for local and state races.
Keith Padgett is no political novice.
The south Savannah Republican, the party’s candidate for the District 162 state House seat held by Democrat Carl Gilliard, ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the school board two years ago.
He’s active in the Chatham County Republican Party and 1st vice president of the Southeast Georgia Republican Assembly (SEGRA), an ultraconservative GOP faction.
Yet in a recent fundraising letter to local Republicans, the 38-year-old Padgett misstates both state and federal campaign finance laws or flouts them altogether.
In addition, an examination of the data collected by Georgia’s campaign finance watchdog Padgett failed during his 2022 school board race to file required paperwork. He has missed deadlines this year to file those reports for his current District 162 race as well.
Padgett’s apparent breaches of Georgia campaign finance law raise questions about the degree to which state political parties examine past compliance with those laws when they recruit and vet their candidates.
Padgett’s infractions mirror those of Gilliard, who from 2020 to 2023 failed repeatedly to file paperwork concerning his campaign donations and expenditures and personal financial disclosure statements as required by law. The Current previously covered those missteps uncovered by the Georgia Campaign Finance Commission.
For what the commission called his “egregious” misuse of campaign contributions, Gilliard agreed last month to pay a $17,000 fine and reimburse his campaign committee $30,000.
Padgett rejects any comparison with Gilliard.
“I haven’t been fined $17,000” and dined out on campaign contributions, he told The Current.
‘Contrary to law and grotesquely illegal’
In his July 3 fundraising letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Current, Padgett falsely told potential donors that their contributions to his campaign committee, Padgett for GA, would be “100% tax deductible.” He also wrote, again falsely, that contributions can be made anonymously.
He also stated that cash donations could be made using Zelle, a digital payments network. These contributions would be “only for personal expenses not covered under the political campaign,” according to the letter. He didn’t specify what those “personal expenses” might be.
Marc Hershovitz, an elections law attorney in Atlanta, described Padgett’s pitch for campaign contributions as “contrary to law and grotesquely illegal,” adding that Padgett’s assurance to donors that their political contributions are tax deductible is “wildly dishonest information.”
Anyone who followed Padgett’s advice and deducted their contribution to him on their taxes would, Hershovitz said, “be committing a crime.”
In response to questions from The Current about the letter, Padgett said there was “some verbiage, some documentation that was in there that shouldn’t have been in there” and acknowledged that his advice on tax deductions was a “mistake.”
He said that at the time he wrote the letter, he had no campaign manager and Washington, D.C.-area political consultant was out of the country. Since then, he has contacted the recipients of the fundraising letter and discussed it, he said.
He refused to identify either his political consultant or his campaign manager who, he said, didn’t want to be “publicly known.”
No record
Padgett’s letter and other campaign fundraising also appears to disregard another state law: the obligation for political candidates to create a campaign committee and register it with the state’s campaign finance watchdog before raising and spending any money electioneering.
In early March, Padgett formally registered his candidacy for the District 162 House seat with the secretary of state’s office and paid the $400 filing fee.
Several weeks later, he incorporated “Padgett for GA LLC,” describing it as a “legislative body” and listing himself as the company’s organizer and registered agent.
To date, however, there’s no record of Padgett registering a campaign committee with the Campaign Finance Commission — a first step before collecting donations or spending money on campaign-related activities. There’s also no record of him having done so in his unsuccessful 2022 school board bid.
Also, to date there’s no record of Padgett submitting records of his campaign-related donations and expenditures, either in 2022 or in his current race against Gilliard. Win or lose, candidates for elected office in Georgia are obliged to file such records at regularly prescribed intervals, even if their campaigns are self-financed.
In response to questions about this year’s campaign committee and its legal status, Padgett told The Current that he “figured” the committee was “already ready” to accept donations and spend money on campaign-related activities.
Vetting?
Under state law, a person running in a partisan county political race in Georgia must be certified (“qualified”) by their county party committee to appear on their party’s slate of candidates. For candidates running for a seat in the state legislature or for another state office, however, that task falls to the state party.
In Padgett’s case, it isn’t clear what input the state GOP sought or received from the Chatham County Republican Committee or other local Republicans before it qualified him to run in the Republican primary in May, where he won 80% of the vote, defeating Tami Williams and setting up his contest with Gilliard in November.
It also isn’t known if, having been certified to run as a representative of the Republican Party, Padgett was provided with or offered coaching on how to comply with campaign finance laws and candidate reporting requirements. Padgett said he has both a campaign manager and Washington, D.C.-based political adviser, but he declined to identify these staffers.
In a statement to The Current, Brittany Brown, chair of the Chatham County Republican Committee, condemned misinformation about campaign donations and urged compliance with campaign finance laws by all candidates:
“The Chatham GOP is firmly against the dissemination of inaccurate information regarding the tax status of campaign contributions. We believe that all individuals, regardless of party affiliation, should adhere to all campaign finance laws and submit accurate and timely reports in accordance with commission requirements.”
Brown, who serves alongside Padgett on the board of SEGRA, later sought to distance the committee from Padgett, noting to The Current that he wasn’t an “active member” of the organization. Under the committee’s guidelines, spelled out in its website, “members” are those who donate money for the organization’s operations.
‘Corruption is all around us’
An industrial and automotive painter by trade and former teacher at Savannah Technical College, Padgett has been campaigning on an “America First” platform. The campaign donation letter states, for instance, that his aim is to make Savannah “a safer community for the Natives,” improve public-school education and refocus a budget on Americans instead of illegal immigrants and aid to “non-American country.”
But when news broke wrote about the fines slapped on Gillard for breaking campaign finance laws, Padgett also wasted no time in seeking to take political advantage of his opponent’s woes.
“Here’s a snapshot of your current District 162 Representative!!” he wrote on his Facebook page linking to a news story about the sanctions against Gilliard.
“Corruption is all around us,” he said, linking to another. “We need to elect officials who will hold the interest of the people before personal gains.”
In what amounted to a plea deal with Gilliard, the state campaign finance commission allowed him to dip into his campaign committee to pay from the $17,000 fine it imposed for his “egregious” misuse of campaign contributions — a decision that Hershovitz, who served as legal counsel to former Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, described as “grotesquely improper.”
The winner of the District 162 seat will earn $22,000 a year with a $247 per diem during the General Assembly’s 40-day legislative session.
