The Oregon Secretary of State's Office is investigating four candidates for Portland City Council for swapping donations in order to help one another unlock thousands of dollars in city funding.

Three of those candidates are running in District 4: Michael Trimble, Chad Lykins, and Mike DiNapoli; Sam Sachs is running in District 2.

"The investigation may grow to involve more" candidates, said Laura Kerns, communications director for Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade.

Willamette Week first reported on the donation swaps and found that 14 candidates across several offices all participated.

Although the candidates say they swapped only small contributions of $5 to $20, the practice was intended to help campaigns gather 250 individual donations from Portland residents to unlock at least $40,000 through the city's matching program.

Kerns said the secretary of state has not yet determined if any law was violated by candidates who swapped donations.

All four candidates told KATU they did not intend to manipulate the matching program, but instead only wanted to show support for other candidates.

"We're working together across different districts to be able to help each other," Trimble said. "Obviously, I'm never going to do it again."

"I want to be transparent and accountable. It was not my intention to game the system or work the system," Sachs told KATU.

"At least for myself, there was no gaming of the system," DiNapoli, a first-time candidate, said. "It was, you know, at this point, it's something I'm learning about the system."

"I participated as a good faith attempt to show mutual appreciation for the effort and sacrifice it takes to run for office," Lykins' campaign said in a statement. "I returned the donations within hours of being made aware that this might be a problem and asked other candidates to do the same."

Lykins is the only one of the four candidates who qualified for the matching program with 665 contributions. Sachs, Trimble, and DiNapoli, the other three, did not reach 250.

The chair of the Portland Elections Commission, Amy Ward, said any contribution made to a campaign in exchange for an item of value, "including the promise of a reciprocal donation," will not be counted toward the matching program.

"[If] these candidates were trying to get certified and matched on these trades, they will not. The City has been looking into the trades and isn't matching traded contributions," Ward told KATU in an email.

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