What it takes to get a “dark money” initiative on the ballot
What it takes to get a “dark money” initiative on the ballot
The “Marketplace Morning Report” is running a special series, “Secret Money, Public Influence,” on money, politics and whether campaign donors can be “secret Santas” who spend big but don’t have to disclose it. This election cycle, we traveled to Arizona, where, in a month, voters will decide whether some of the biggest campaign spenders should have to reveal their identities. How this measure got on the ballot, what it hopes to achieve and what opponents say about it provide lessons about the so-called dark money that can sway elections near you.
At the edge of the high-country town of Flagstaff, Buffalo Park would be a hikers paradise if not for the on-and-off drizzle on the first day of autumn. In a gazebo with picnic tables, we met up with volunteers who helped put Arizona’s campaign finance disclosure initiative on the November ballot.
Arizona’s No. 1, tippy-top, most effective volunteer gatherer of signatures, Kelly Gibbs, was present and sporting eye-catching headgear. It kind of looks like a chef’s hat, but there are dollar bills sticking up all around the top. It has the Stop Dark Money logo front and center.
“The hat would attract the children,” said Gibbs, a retired elementary school teacher. “And then the parents were trapped. So that worked out really well.”
Diane McQueen, another volunteer, is also pretty darn good at collecting signatures: “They’d say, ‘You mean Charles Koch?’ Or, ‘You mean George Soros?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes. Here, sign.’”
McQueen also coordinated hundreds of volunteers. Among her pitches: It becomes part of the public record when donors large and small give money the regular way. But often, the big donors can stay anonymous by giving to an intermediary, a political nonprofit organization.
“We’re just asking that, ‘Hey, big spender, you should play by the same rules we have to play by.’ We’re not saying you can’t do your ads,” McQueen said. “Whether we like them or not, just say who you are.”
With 4 million registered voters to canvass in Arizona, volunteers alone can’t do it. A big funder of this ballot initiative, Phoenix businessman David Tedesco, the CEO of Outlier, used his experience evaluating companies to figure out which firm could manage the paid staff.
“It’s not the cleanest, most white-shoe bunch of companies that are out there doing this,” Tedesco said. “We wanted to work with a very high-quality group that we felt we could trust.”
He helped find a Texas firm. The resulting signature forms have to be superprecise, with signers listing the address they had used to register to vote. Some get challenged. The matter got to Arizona’s Supreme Court, which confirmed that there were plenty enough to make the ballot.
“I was dancing around the living room,” Gibbs said. “My husband made fun of me.”
Crafting these initiatives takes legal advice. Patrick Llewellyn at the Campaign Legal Center in Washington believes this one will stand up.
“Prop 211 would not stop anyone from speaking and would not limit the amount of money anyone could spend on elections,” Llewellyn said. “Instead, Prop 211 ensures that when big political spenders spend big money to influence Arizona voters, those voters have real transparency about where that money is really coming from.”
And the most important ingredient may be persistence.
“I’m just a stubborn person,” said Terry Goddard, a former Arizona attorney general and leader of the Proposition 211 campaign. It would require that big corporate and individual donors — $5,000 or more — disclose their names when giving campaign money through an intermediary, a type of nonprofit that does political work. That disclosure rule kicks in after those nonprofits have spent $50,000 or more on a statewide campaign or $25,000 or more on a local campaign.
This is the fourth time Goddard and his team have tried this. In 2016, the money dried up.
“Ironically, the financial contributor that we were depending on wrote us kind of sheepishly and said, ‘Well, I believe in dark money. I do a lot of it,’” Goddard recounted.
In 2018, too many signatures were invalidated, and that was that. They tried again two years later, in 2020, but … pandemic.
“You have to get a live signature, it has to be person to person, the circulator has to observe the signer in the process of signing,” Goddard said.
When the signatures were verified in this year’s go-round, “I felt like I could exhale,” said Becky Daggett, who’s helping with Prop 211 even as she runs for mayor of Flagstaff, a nonpartisan post. “And know that these years of organizing and collecting signatures had paid off.”
Now it’s all eyes on Nov. 8. And even if voters go for the proposal, it ain’t over till it’s over … till it’s over. Cathi Herrod runs a conservative nonprofit, the Center for Arizona Policy Action, that’s allowed to contribute to campaigns.
“If 211 passes, I certainly expect a constitutional challenge,” she said.
Though the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once wrote that allowing anonymous donations isn’t “the Home of the Brave,” current conservative Justice Clarence Thomas writes about “cancel culture” and opposes disclosure.
“I think this current court is concerned about individual freedom and the right to free speech,” Herrod said.
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