What public records or campaign filings have actually documented payments to crowd‑for‑hire firms in U.S. elections?
Executive summary
Public registries maintained by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the IRS are the primary places where campaigns, PACs and 527 groups report vendors and expenditures that could reveal payments to crowd‑for‑hire firms, and watchdogs like OpenSecrets and the Center for Public Integrity republish and analyze that data [1] [2] [3] [4]. Independent reporting has documented that companies such as Crowds on Demand have been hired for political and advocacy assignments (Los Angeles Times), but the file set supplied here does not include a specific named FEC or IRS campaign filing showing a payment line‑item to a crowd‑for‑hire firm [5].
1. Where public evidence would appear: FEC, IRS and watchdog databases
Federal law makes campaigns and many outside groups disclose expenditures and vendors to official databases: candidate committees and many political committees file periodic FEC reports; groups organized as 527s file with the IRS; and when independent expenditures exceed statutory thresholds additional 48‑hour and quarterly disclosures are required — all of which are searchable and are aggregated by sites such as OpenSecrets and the FEC’s own portal [6] [1] [2] [3] [4].
2. What investigative reporting has already shown about crowd‑for‑hire firms
Reporting by the Los Angeles Times found a Beverly Hills company, Crowds on Demand, that openly markets paid crowd services and that was accused in lawsuits of deploying paid actors to lobby or protest on behalf of clients — a direct real‑world example of the alleged business model of “crowd‑for‑hire” firms [5].
3. The gap between media accounts and public filings in the supplied reporting
The sources provided show where disclosures live and that crowd firms operate [1] [4] [5], but the supplied materials do not include specific FEC/IRS line‑item filings that list payments to a named crowd‑for‑hire firm; the investigative article reports assignments and lawsuits but does not, in the excerpts supplied here, reproduce the corresponding campaign finance entries [5]. That means the supplied corpus establishes plausibility and mechanism but stops short of a concrete public‑record citation for a payment.
4. How such payments would typically show up in filings (and how to find them)
Campaigns and committees generally report vendor payments in their itemized disbursements, and independent expenditures and electioneering communications crossing statutory thresholds trigger additional, time‑sensitive filings; researchers and reporters therefore look for vendor names, memo text and payee addresses in FEC filings and IRS 527 reports and then triangulate against invoices, contracts and corporate registrations to link those lines to commercial “crowd” firms [6] [3] [2].
5. Legal and disclosure constraints that complicate attribution
Disclosure rules allow vendors to be listed under trade names or shell entities and permit substantial spending by nonprofit and 527 groups with differing disclosure regimes; FECA’s definitions and thresholds drive when and how often reporting occurs, and the law also restricts certain sources of campaign funds, which affects how payments may be routed and labeled in filings [6] [7] [8].
6. Bottom line and what the supplied record actually documents
Taken together, the sources show that (A) public records exist and are the correct place to look for payments to crowd‑for‑hire firms (FEC and IRS filings aggregated by OpenSecrets and others) and (B) mainstream reporting has identified crowd firms engaged in political assignments, but within the provided materials there is no direct citation of a specific FEC/IRS filing that names a payment to a crowd‑for‑hire firm [1] [2] [4] [5] [3] [6]. To convert the plausible to the provable requires pulling vendor line items from FEC/527 filings for specific campaigns and matching those entries to corporate records or contracts — a step demonstrated by investigative outlets but not replicated in the subset of documents supplied here [5] [3].