Maine Representative Les Fossel has introduced LD 1879, which would require “party formation committees” to meet the same campaign contribution disclosure laws that other types of political groups must follow. The bill is co-sponsored by nine other legislators, including the Speaker of the House, Robert Nutting. All of the sponsors are Republicans except for Representative Teresa Hayes, who is a Democrat.
Maine law already provides that when a group wishes to qualify a new party for the ballot, it must submit a Declaration of Intent, which must be signed by at least ten voters. The provisions of LD 1879 seem to only relate to those ten individuals. If the intent of the bill is to require Americans Elect to disclose the names of contributors who are paying for petitioning, the bill seems powerless to accomplish that, and this would seem to be true, even if the bill had been enacted in the past and was already in effect. There seems to be no reason to believe that the contributions for paid petitioners would necessarily go through the ten individuals who signed the “Declaration of Intent” to qualify a new party. The existing law, section 303, says, “Ten or more voters who are not enrolled in a party qualified under section 301 must file a declaration of intent to form a party with the Secretary of State”, but nothing says that those ten individuals are necessarily the people who are arranging for paid petitioners.
Section 303 says that the 10 or more voters who declare their intent to form the party, shall print the petitions and may then circulate the petitions.
It would be pretty bizarre to conclude that some corporate entity was making an independent expenditure with no coordination with those actually forming the party. Are the 10 or more voters who formed the party going to claim they were straw voters and nothing to do with the party?
#1, no, they are not going to claim they were straw voters. But it doesn’t follow logically that just because they signed the form to register the party, that they are the people hiring the paid circulators and raising the money for them.
I predict a wave of such attempted restrictive laws coming down the pike in various states squarely aimed at Americans Elect.
#2 Read Section 303 carefully. The voters are filing their intent to form a party. They are not merely signing a form. They are the founders of the party.
#4, they may be the founders of the party inside Maine, but it doesn’t follow logically that the Maine branch of Americans Elect is hiring the petitioners.
State attempts to require Americans Elect to reveal their donors are not likely to ever succeed, because Americans Elect’s leadership is highly centralized in Washington, D.C., not in the various states. It might be more sensible for Congress to pass a bill concerning parties that are attempting to spend money with the eventual goal of running a presidential campaign.
#5 Maine is only attempting to regulate a party that is petitioning “to participate in the primary election”.
It doesn’t make sense for Congress to regulate presidential elections at all beyond setting the time at which the presidential electors are appointed, when the electors cast their vote; how the States ascertained who was to be appointed as an elector; and who they cast their votes for. Oregon v Mitchell and Anderson v Celebrezze were wrongly decided at least so far as they touched upon presidential elections.
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