Citizen Portal

Get email alerts on the Campaign Finance topic

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

Ethics trainer: door‑knocking activity no longer a reportable contribution; expenditures still reportable

Tennessee Senate (Senate Floor Session) · January 15, 2026

Summary

At annual ethics training, Bill Young told senators that the General Assembly exempted door‑knocking activity from the definition of contributions for campaign finance reporting; he emphasized coordinated spending remains an expenditure that must be reported and urged candidates to maintain documentation.

Bill Young, who led the Senate's annual ethics training, told members that a statutory change removed door‑knocking activity from the definition of reportable contributions but did not exempt related expenditures. "Last year, the General Assembly exempted from the definition of contributions on the campaign finance side any activity related to a door knocking campaign conducted by a political campaign committee or any other entity or individual. And that's no longer a reportable contribution to a candidate," Young said.

Young cautioned that coordination with a candidate changes the reporting obligation: while the activity is not a contribution, it becomes a reportable expenditure by the political campaign committee conducting or coordinating the effort. He advised candidates and committees to preserve records and use the bureau's website and staff contacts (pages 87–88 of the provided PowerPoint) for compliance questions.

AI generated

The text on this page is AI generated. Summaries, highlights, analysis, and video transcripts are all produced from the original source material.

AI can make mistakes, so if you spot one, and we will fix it for everyone.

Note: the source content is unaltered by us. Any content source we link to, be it a video, an audio recording, or a document, is presented exactly as its publisher released it. That publisher is usually a government body, sometimes an individual official or another organisation.

Source