Wealthy Donors Are Hiding Political Money

NY Times -  The 10 largest individual donations so far in the midterm elections? They total almost $300 million — and none of them came from a human being. Some of the origins can be deduced, but other checks came from a series of little-known nonprofits whose original donors will most likely never be known.

This is the new normal in American elections. Increasingly, individuals do not cut the big checks to political campaigns, donations in which their names would have to be disclosed to the Federal Election Commission or state regulators. They come more and more from an alphabet soup of patriotic-sounding philanthropic organizations that send hundreds of millions of dollars to political action committees but do not have to disclose where the money came from.