In the News
Washington Examiner: 2020 shows money can’t buy elections, so let’s remove restrictive contribution limits
By Nathan Maxwell
We should have learned our lesson by now. In elections, it’s not what you pay; it’s what you say.
Hillary Clinton spent almost twice as much as Donald Trump only to lose the 2016 election, even while independent groups supporting Clinton outspent those supporting Trump by 3-to-1. In the spirit of making the same mistakes, many 2020 hopefuls have taken “you get what you pay for” as a given. Billionaire Tom Steyer dumped more than $300 million from his own pocket into his campaign and failed to score a single delegate. Michael Bloomberg somehow did both better and worse, spending over $1 billion to score 49 delegates at $22.6 million apiece.
Candidates for Congress are now taking their turn at proving what money can’t buy as primary results roll in. In New York’s 17th Congressional District, former federal prosecutor Adam Schleifer had spent over $4 million by June 3 for a House bid that apparently cost far less. His opponent Mondaire Jones spent only about $786,000, and that was enough for him to win the primary despite his concerns about “[having] to compete with the son of a billionaire.”
Not even the advantages of incumbency – higher name recognition, better political networks, and support carried over from previous campaigns – enable candidates to “buy” their win. In New York’s 16th, Jamaal Bowman, whose campaign spent merely $626,000 by June 3, won nearly 61% of the primary votes, despite longtime incumbent Eliot Engel’s campaign shelling out over $1.3 million by the same date.
American Viewpoints (podcast): Free Speech, Protests, Pandemics, and You
Hosted by Mike Ferguson
Alec Greven from the Institute for Free Speech discusses the complex intersection of protest, public health concerns because of COVID-19, and the First Amendment.
New from the Institute for Free Speech
“Paid For By”: Principles for Accurate and Effective Political Ad Disclaimers in the 21st Century
By Alex Baiocco
Disclaimers for ads supporting or opposing candidates or ballot measures tell viewers and listeners who is attempting to persuade them. While this information can be useful, laws requiring disclaimers burden First Amendment rights. Disclaimers take up time or space in an ad, detracting from the speaker’s message. Such laws are often complex and create substantial compliance burdens. As a result, groups risk inadvertently violating the law and may choose to avoid speech that triggers the requirements. Recently, some states and localities have reached far beyond requiring ads’ sponsors to identify themselves, instead mandating lengthy disclaimers with misleading and invasive information about supporters of the entity doing the speaking. Under some statutes, even issue advocacy triggers onerous disclaimer requirements.
Lawmakers and regulators must carefully consider the costs to free speech when writing and implementing these requirements. They should also keep in mind that the First Amendment strictly limits government’s power to compel speech, especially when that power is used to regulate political speech. Regulations should never be written with the goal of discouraging people from contributing to groups that purchase ads or deterring groups from speaking.
Policymakers should consider the following key principles for crafting requirements that promote accurate and effective disclaimers while minimizing costs to speech, privacy, and associational rights. Successful implementation of these principles will inform voters about the source of a message while keeping compliance burdens manageable for speakers and ad sellers alike.
Congress
Politico: Morning Tech
By Leah Nylen
PARLER AGREES TO PARLEY – The CEO of social media site Parler said he will take up House Republicans on their offer to testify about competition in social media. “I will accept the offer, and I will be honest and transparent about my experiences in the tech space and how difficult it has been,” John Matze told C-SPAN’s Washington Journal on Sunday. The Twitter-alternative has almost 3 million users and is now home to many Republican politicians, though President Donald Trump hasn’t personally joined — yet. Matze said Trump’s campaign and one of his son’s have accounts.
On the site’s goals: Matze, who said he identifies as a libertarian, told C-SPAN that Parler isn’t intended to be the “conservative” Twitter but to encourage debate from all sides. So far, no one has taken up the company on its “progressive challenge,” which offers openly liberal pundits up to $20,000 to join Parler.
On fact-checking: “We don’t have any fact-checking. We are going to rely on the comments of the community to do that,” Matze said. “I don’t think it’s right for us to come in and say what is and is not true.”
Ripon Advance: McCaul unveils bipartisan measure to combat foreign election interference
Bipartisan legislation recently introduced by U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) would authorize federal rewards for providing information on foreign election interference.
“This bipartisan legislation sends a clear message to malicious actors attempting to interfere in our democratic process: the United States will absolutely not tolerate it, and there will be consequences,” said Rep. McCaul, ranking member on the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Rep. McCaul on July 9 introduced the Rewards for Providing Information on Foreign Election Interference Act, H.R. 7519, with bill sponsor U.S. Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
H.R. 7519, if enacted, would increase U.S. State Department financial resources to reward people who alert American authorities about foreign attempts to interfere in U.S. elections…
According to the text of the bill, foreign election interference would mean conduct by a foreign person that violates U.S. criminal, voting rights or campaign finance law; or is performed by any person acting as an agent of or on behalf of a foreign government or criminal enterprise.
FCC
Voice of San Diego: Telemarketer Says Another GOP Campaign Was Behind Phil Graham Robocalls
By Jesse Marx
A San Diego man who’s facing a nearly $10 million fine for spoofing political robocalls defended himself Friday by identifying some of the people who he says hired him.
Kenneth Moser, a local marketing professional, told the Federal Communications Commission that he was working with relatives of Maureen Muir to help her bid for the 76th Assembly District race in 2018 against a fellow Republican, Phil Graham.
Two weeks before the primary, a woman accused Graham of battery. Despite the fact Graham was cleared of wrongdoing, Moser amplified the allegation by referencing it in a voice message to thousands of potential voters and by disguising the true source of the calls.
Graham is the stepson of former San Diego mayor and Gov. Pete Wilson, and federal authorities agreed to look into the disinformation campaign after Graham’s legal team petitioned. The FCC released its findings late last year and gave Moser the opportunity to respond before imposing any actual penalties.
Moser’s telling of how it all went down suggests that one group of Republicans sabotaged another during a hotly contested Assembly race, and likely helped the Democrats flip what had been a traditionally red seat based in North County.
Free Speech
Wall Street Journal: Democracy Dies in Darkness, but Don’t Blame Trump
By Gerard Baker
Remember the grave warnings when Donald Trump was elected about how his presidency would usher in an unprecedented assault on freedom of expression? …
Four years on, it’s clear the warnings were justified.
Consider the state of free speech in Mr. Trump’s America…
In classrooms, newsrooms and boardrooms across the country, you can almost hear the silence as people internally check what they say in the knowledge that if they cross the line they’ll be publicly denounced and very likely terminated.
The darkness has indeed claimed democracy.
But wait. It’s not Mr. Trump who’s silenced them. Can you name a single person in the media who has suffered materially for saying hostile things about the president in the past four years? In fact, there’s no surer way to advance your career in entertainment, news, sports, literature and even business circles than to issue some well-rehearsed bromide on social media about the monster in the White House.
Yes, the president characteristically reaches for the extreme when he calls journalists “the enemy of the people.” But we’ve seen where the real threat to freedom lies: a climate of ideological intolerance in our nation’s cultural institutions that suffocates any attempt to question it.
Federalist: The Left Found A New Love For Corporate Personhood
By David Marcus
The classic argument against the Citizen United decision is that corporations are not people and therefore do not have free speech rights. This was always a nonsense position, but it was rooted in a fairly simple proposition. According to the left at the time, corporations existed to make money, unlike people (most anyway) making money was the sole purpose of the corporation making it unfit to play a role in our electoral politics.
But if the argument against corporate involvement in politics was that these are simply soulless profit machines, why would these same people want the soulless profit machines to play such a heavy-handed role in social and cultural issues? We shouldn’t trust corporations to give money to political campaigns but we should trust them to set the parameters of acceptable discourse? …
The bottom line is that there never was much principled opposition to Citizens United; Democrats opposed it because they assumed it would help Republicans…
What progressives have come to realize over the past decade is that there are corporations, many of them, who are natural allies to them on myriad issues. Look how quickly so many corporations took on the mantra, “Black Lives Matter” even though it serves as the name of a Marxist revolutionary organization…
You have to give the left some credit here; they got off the sidelines and got in the game. If you can’t beat the corporations, join them. They should stop yapping about Citizens United now. They probably won’t, but their argument that corporations should be neutral when it comes to politics and social issues is right out the window.
Media
Politico: Newsroom or PAC? Liberal group muddies online information wars
By Alex Thompson
“Rep. Max Rose Deploys With National Guard to Get Hospital Ready For Coronavirus Patients,” read an April 17 article about the freshman congressman from New York. The article – boosted into circulation in New York by thousands of dollars in targetedFacebook ads – was mostly a rewrite of the congressman’s press release from the previous day. The same thing happened the next month…
The articles and Facebook ad dollars look like the efforts of a run-of-the-mill political group. But they are actually from a news outlet: CourierNewsroom.com, also known as Courier, which was created and funded by the Democratic-aligned digital organization Acronym. Courier has spent over $1.4 million on Facebook ads this election cycle, mostly to promote its flattering articles and videos about more than a dozen endangered House Democrats at the top of the Democratic Party’s priority list this November, according to Facebook’s political ad tracker.
But because Courier is organized as a media outlet, it does not have to disclose its donors or the total money it spends promoting Democratic politicians.
The $1.4 million in Facebook ads is likely just a fraction of the money behind the Courier project, which includes a newsroom of at least 25 people and eight separate websites with content often focused on local issues in presidential swing states. But this activity – creating an unregulated advertising stream promoting Democratic officeholders, more akin to a PAC than a newsroom – diverges from other partisan news outlets that are proliferating online as local newspapers struggle.
Online Speech Platforms
Axios: Facebook’s plan: Make nice, but don’t give in
By Scott Rosenberg and Kyle Daly
Friday Bloomberg reported Facebook was weighing a temporary blackout on political ads right before the November election. That could give the social network a jump on reining in misinformation – but would hardly satisfy critics who have focused on Facebook’s failure to curb hate speech or to moderate President Trump’s violence-threatening tweets…
A pre-election political ad blackout wouldn’t address the misinformation that floods social media through non-paid posts.
“Blacking out political ads is a solution in search of a problem. Political ads are now the *most monitored* content on Facebook, and are of little concern compared to the massive volume of organic electoral misinfo from groups & pages,” tweeted former Facebook product manager James Barnes.
Political ads aren’t even mentioned in the ad boycott organizers’ list of 10 demands.
Bloomberg: Facebook Considers a Political Ad Ban for Election, Pleasing No One
By Kurt Wagner and Naomi Nix
Civil rights groups were swift in their criticism of a plan being weighed by Facebook Inc. to halt political advertising before the U.S. election…
“@Facebook claims to care about free expression but would rather restrict political speech altogether than take responsibility for curbing hate speech, voter suppression and disinformation,” tweeted Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change.
“This is nothing but a distraction,” added Derrick Johnson, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in a statement. “It does not address their platform being used by white supremacists and other hate groups, nor does it prevent political campaigns and domestic or foreign entities from promoting voter misinformation and interfering with our elections.” …
“A political ads blackout is not going to address the real-time voter suppression and voter misinformation that we’re already seeing regularly,” said Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights. Gupta said . . . the company needs to take more aggressive action against remarks like those U.S. President Donald Trump made on Facebook Friday morning, in which he called mail-in ballots “a formula for RIGGING an Election.”…
A temporary ban on political ads also could make it harder to combat misinformation in the most crucial window of time before the election…
Facebook is an important outlet for politicians, especially at a time when many people are stuck at home and campaign rallies pose potential health risks due to the coronavirus.
Miami Herald: Facebook should ditch political ads altogether. No one will miss them
By Jon Healey
Facebook may finally stop lending its enormously powerful microphone and amplifier to deceitful politicians and manipulative campaigns. And in doing so, it would also block truthful candidates who are just trying to correct the record, outline their policies or encourage people to get out and vote.
It’s a fair trade as far as I’m concerned…
Please, park your “censorship” complaints outside. Pols and campaigns would presumably continue to be free to post whatever they feel like posting on their Facebook pages, and their followers could share and recirculate those posts to the four corners of the social network. All Facebook appears to be considering is a ban on candidates and campaigns paying to spread their messages to the users they target, with Facebook’s help, by location, gender, age, interests and a host of other personal factors.
As the Cambridge Analytica scandal amply demonstrated, such microtargeting helps advertisers train their messages on the people who’ll be most susceptible to them. In other words, it’s what helps direct deceptive ads away from the people who will view them critically and toward those who are most likely to be manipulated by them…
Critics of microtargeting say that it enables campaigns to quietly deliver different messages to different groups of voters, rather than having to appeal broadly to the electorate as they do on TV and radio. That’s an alarming lack of transparency. Getting Facebook out of the game wouldn’t end that practice, but it would remove one of the main outlets for it.
Candidates and Campaigns
Politico: California Playbook
By Carla Marinucci, Jeremy B. White, Graph Massara, and Aaron Leathley
CAUGHT by California Target Book’s @RobPyers: “@TomSteyer illegally maxes out to #MESen Democrat Sara Gideon’s campaign for a FOURTH time, his contributions now exceeding the federal contribution limits by $16,800.” Here’s the link to campaign finance docs.
The States
Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal and the Division of Consumer Affairs (“the Division”) today announced a temporary Voluntary Compliance Program to encourage certain 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations to comply with their obligations to register as charitable organizations with the Division…
Under the law, social welfare organizations that engage in political activities without being required to disclose their donors to the general public-so-called “dark money” groups-may still be required to report their substantial donors…
“As we move into election season, we cannot let dark money groups hide in the shadows,” said Attorney General Grewal…
In addition to increased enforcement of the CRIA against 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations, the Attorney General and the Division have taken several steps in response to actions by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that make it easier for such groups to keep the identities of their donors hidden from government authorities.
After the IRS first announced the elimination of federal donor-reporting requirements, Attorney General Grewal joined Montana Governor Stephen C. Bullock and the Montana Department of Revenue in a lawsuit to challenge the IRS’s policy change. In July 2019, a federal court agreed that the IRS violated the law. And when the IRS proposed to change its policy a second time, in December 2019, Attorney General Grewal co-led twenty Attorney Generals opposing the change.
In addition, in May 2019, the Division amended its rules to ensure that dark money groups and other charitable organizations would continue to be required to report their substantial donors to the Division even if they are no longer required to report that information to the IRS.
Willamette Week: Oregon Department of Justice Dismisses Elections Complaint Against Sen. Shemia Fagan’s Campaign
By Nigel Jaquiss
The Oregon Department of Justice has dismissed an elections complaint against state Sen. Shemia Fagan (D-Portland) after completing an investigation last week. Fagan won the Democratic Party’s nomination for secretary of state in the May 19 primary.
The complaint, filed by Ryan Wruck, initially a candidate in the race and later a volunteer for Fagan’s leading opponent, state Sen. Mark Hass (D-Beaverton), took issue with a website called oregoniansforballotaccess.com.
Wruck told a state investigator he based his complaint on a May 6 story in WW. The story reported on displeasure within the Democratic Party about Fagan’s campaign website.
In his complaint, Wruck alleged the website “was in support of Ms. Fagan, but posed as a neutral site and was deliberately misleading to uninformed voters. It further alleged that the algorithms in internet search engines had been ‘tricked’ so that this website would appear first when a candidate’s name was searched,” according to the DOJ report by Assistant Attorney General Michael W. Grant.
In his investigation, Grant determined that Winning Mark, the firm run by the Portland political consultant Mark Wiener, built and maintained the website for Oregonians for Ballot Access. Winning Mark purchased advertising from Google, which then placed the website at the top of search results related to the campaign. That, rather than any nefarious algorithm, explained why the website popped up first on internet searches about the race, Grant found.
Post and Courier: Dark money groups spent at least $875,000 trying to sway Myrtle Beach state Senate race
By Andrew Brown and Jamie Lovegrove
Wealthy individuals and corporations can target whoever they want in South Carolina. They can drop unlimited amounts of money to try to defeat lawmakers who stand in the way of their legislative goals.
All the while, they can obscure their identities behind nonprofits, shell companies and fly-by-night organizations…
“It undermines the integrity of the democratic process, because, very clearly, the organizations that are the sponsors of these TV ads are not the real source of the messaging,” said Austin Graham, an attorney with the Campaign Legal Center. “There are individuals somewhere behind that who are playing out an agenda and playing out a strategy.”
Graham, who focuses on strengthening state campaign finance regulations, doesn’t understand why South Carolina legislators don’t want to reform the state’s laws…
“It’s only when the tables are turned and they are the target of one of these dark money attack campaigns that lawmakers see this as a problem,” Graham said.
“It’s pretty clear that there is political money laundering going on in South Carolina, and one day it will come for you,” he said…
South Carolina is one of only three states – along with Alabama and Indiana – that does not track or police this type of political advertising in any way. That’s according to the Campaign Finance Institute, a group that monitors election spending throughout the country.
Several other states also allow groups to hide the names of their donors. But 47 states require at least some type of public disclosure that details how much each political organization spends on ads explicitly advocating for or against a candidate’s election.
None of that happens in South Carolina.
