Campaign finance ballot measures

From Ballotpedia

Issues
Measures by topic
Measures by year

Campaign finance initiatives have to do with whether and how a state can regulate campaign finance of political campaigns. Issues regarding campaign finance largely revolve around the use of public versus private funding. More specific issues include:

• Limitations on monetary amounts of public and private funding.
• Eligibility requirements of candidates regarding receiving public funding.
• Use of public resources to assist in collecting further public funds.
• Ability to privatize the entire campaign process.
• Use of taxpayer money, as opposed to voluntary contributions.
• Full disclosure requirements.
• Private institutions who can and cannot contribute (includes corporations, labor unions, the public at-large, etc.)
• Categorization of different types of funding (bribery, conflict-of-interest, etc.)

History of campaign finance laws

Campaign finance laws were first instituted in the very late 19th century, during the progressive reform era. The general goal was to eliminate big business from federal election campaigns. Many charged that large monetary donations were causing rampant corruption. When President Theodore Roosevelt was accused in 1904 of having been given large contributions in return for favors (which was later admitted by several businesses), he requested that Congress to begin campaign finance reform. This spurred the formation of the National Publicity Law Organization (NPLO), a citizens group dedicated to demanding regulation of political finances and public disclosure of spending. Congress eventually passed tangible legislation regarding the issue in 1907 with the Tillman Act, which said "it shall be unlawful for any national bank, or any corporation organized by authority of any laws of Congress, to make a money contribution in connection with any election to any political office."^[1] The NPLO continued to call for more comprehensive reforms, particularly by pressing for full disclosure of campaign receipts and expenditures to get a complete sense of where money came from and where it was going. In 1910, the Federal Corrupt Practices Act (more commonly known as the Publicity Act of 1910) was passed, but this did little to sway corrupt practices as it only required post-election reports of national party committees or committees operating in two or more states. This inadequacy of these and other smaller reforms became wholly clear when the Teapot Dome Scandal struck in Warren G. Harding's administration. While not directly related to elections (the scandal involved gifts made by oil developers in a non-election year to federal officials who would grant oil leases), it once again forced Congress to reassess financial contribution laws. They passed the Federal Corrupt Practices Act of 1925, which stood as the basic template for legislation until the 1970s.^[2]

The amendments to the original Corrupt Practices Act provided little substantive change to the government's overall approach to financial regulation. There were some changes, however: Primaries were no longer governed by campaign finance legislation, all political committees had to file disclosure reports at regular intervals, and spending limits were raised slightly for Senate and House seats. Most, however, continued to ignore these provisions, as there were no strict enforcement mechanisms in place to attend the government's demands. It wasn't until the rise of Franklin Roosevelt that Congress returned to this issue. With the rapid growth of the federal workforce, opponents of Roosevelt feared they would become a permanent political force for the Democratic Party.^[2] To do this, Congress passed the 1939 Hatch Act, which prohibited political activity from federal employees not already restricted by the Pendleton Act. The latter already did the same for government civil service employees. The central provision was they could no longer solicit campaign contributions, doing away with a good deal of revenue for party organizations. After the emergence of labor unions as a major political force, Congress passed the Smith-Connally Act of 1943, doing the same to them what the Hatch Act did to federal employees.^[3]

Between the end of World War II and the early 1970s, immense developmental changes occurred within the campaign process. Candidates, rather than party committees and organizations, became the locus for campaign funding. With the rise of television, it became increasingly important to use that as a means of political communication, raising campaign costs all the more. Despite increasing costs, however, no reform was passed and little was attempted until Russell Long, a senator and chair of the Senate Finance Committee, passed a reform bill that sought to reduce the influence of wealthy donors and ease fundraising demands. In the bill, political parties would be provided with public subsidies for presidential campaigns, which would in turn be paid for by allowing taxpayers to use a federal tax checkoff to provide a single dollar. Despite his immediate victory, Congress eventually decided to make the Long Act inoperative in the face of criticisms that said it didn't address the real problem at hand of rising costs.^[2]

A major overhaul finally came in 1971, when Congress passed the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, which provided for a more comprehensive network of strict guidelines that extended to all components of the campaign process. It imposed limits on both the amount candidates could give to their own campaign, as well as the amount a campaign could spend on media. Public disclosure measures were also expanded to include all federal candidates and committees. These provisions, however, did little to allay the rapidly rising costs of campaigns; disclosure requirements revealed that between 1968 and 1972, total campaign expenses rose from $300 million to $425 million. After the Watergate scandal revealed massive amounts of illegal corporate contributions and undisclosed funds, Congress was spurred once again to institute stricter laws.^[4] So, in 1974, a set of amendments were made to the original FECA, of which little remained afterward. All disclosure laws and limits on contributions and expenditures were intensified. It also replaced media spending limits within a campaign with aggregate limits to all federal candidates. The main difference was the establishment of an independent agency with primary regulatory authority, called the Federal Election Commission (FEC). The tax checkoff option originally suggested by Long was eventually instituted to pay for the public funding option the government would provide.

Through the rest of the 1970s, some amendments were adopted to lessen the more harsh qualities of the 1974 FECA Amendments. Reporting and disclosure were revised to lower the amount of paperwork necessary, and in an effort to involve locally-based party organizations, some exemptions were granted to these smaller institutions. This allowed them to spend the money they would have paid on grass-roots volunteer activities, as well as extended get-out-the-vote programs.

One of the last major developments in the evolution of campaign finance procedures was the development of "hard" and "soft" money. Hard money refers to contributions made to specific candidates to fund their campaign. Along with it come greater restrictions, particularly regarding who is barred from directly donating money. Soft money, rather, refers to donations given in the name of an entire political party, which can be used for any initiative the party deems. While the assumption is that such funds contribute only to "party building" activities, many have pointed out that it allows political parties to free up money to fuel a high-profile candidate, resulting in what amounts to a direct contribution for that person. Those normally prohibited from contributing to specific candidates may provide funds to the party as a whole, even including those who have already supplied the maximum amount allowed towards a specific candidate. By the 1990s, soft money had become a major component of national election financing.^[5] Since then, however, there has been little tangible development of the legal structure that surrounds the campaign financing process.

Freedom of speech

Since the major reforms of the 1970s, much has been made of the intersection of campaign finance regulation and freedom of speech rights. The best example came immediately after the 1974 amendments to FECA, when Senator James L. Buckley brought a lawsuit against the new bill on behalf of a coalition of both liberals and conservatives in the Supreme Court case Buckley v. Valeo. They argued that expenditure and contribution limitations essentially constituted federal limitations on speech and expression. The opening remarks of the case stated, "A restriction of the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communications during a campaign necessarily reduces the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached. This is because virtually every means of communicating ideas in today's mass society requires the expenditure of money."^[6]

The result constituted a partial, but substantial, victory for proponents of Buckley. Although the Court upheld restrictions on the size of campaign contributions from donors and comprehensive disclosure requirements, they eliminated restrictions on candidate spending and independent expenditures in support of candidate (namely, funds not given directly to a candidate but which work to aid them). These, they admitted, burdened citizen's First Amendment rights and were unconstitutional.^[7]

Some have gone as far as to say that even the contribution limits that were retained act in the same way as those that were done away with. Chief Justice Warren Burger, the only dissenting vote in Buckley v. Valeo, warned that contribution limits, in addition to spending limits, restricted possibilities for political speech from grassroots activity. The loss of "seed money" in the form of early, large contributions would discriminate against many candidates not working within the standard, bipartisan organization of U.S. politics. Furthermore, provisions for public funding of presidential campaigns could be used to disadvantage challengers and "third-party" and independent candidates.^[7]

With the relatively recent passages of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act and the McCain-Feingold Act, which both serve to institute a pre-election ban on "issue advertisements" from corporations and unions, more and more people have brought up possible infringements on free speech these seemingly fair and just provisions establish.^[8]

2008

• Alaska Clean Elections Act (2008)
• Oregon Ballot Measure 13 (2008)
• Oregon Ballot Measure 5 (2008)
• Oregon Ballot Measure 6 (2008)

2006

• California Proposition 89 (2006)

2002

• Massachusetts Question 3 (2002)

2000

• California Proposition 25 (2000)

See also

• List of ballot measures by topic
• Ballot measures about the conduct of election campaigns

References

1. ↑ ["Tillman Act of 1907”, 34 Stat, 864, January 26, 1907]
2. ↑ ^{2.0 2.1 2.2} Money and Politics, "A History of Federal Campaign Finance Law"
3. ↑ Junto Society: How Government Works, "The History of Campaign Finance Reform"
4. ↑ The Washington Post, "The Watergate Story"
5. ↑ CRS Report for Congress, "Soft and Hard Money in Contemporary Elections: What Federal Law Does and Does Not Regulate", March 15, 2002
6. ↑ U.S. Supreme Court Media, "Buckley v. Valeo"
7. ↑ ^{7.0 7.1} Hoover Institution: Public Policy Inquiry, "Campaign Finance Regulation: Faulty Assumptions and Undemocratic Consequences", Bradley A. Smith
8. ↑ Cato Policy Report, "Free Speech and Campaign Finance", March/April 2004