Oct. 30, 2006
Voters Beware, Trick-or-Treaters Not the Only Ones Wearing Masks
By Chris Heagarty
RALEIGH - North Carolina voters are a pretty savvy bunch. They are veterans of such titanic battles as the Jim Hunt vs. Jesse Helms races. And they generally know that if an ad shows an elderly couple worrying about how they’ll afford their medicine, it’s probably been paid for by a group that wants to charge a lot for medicine.
So hopefully, when the election season drags out its Halloween parade of tricks, voters will be prepared for them.
The best defense against misleading campaign tactics is, fittingly, the same defense we may have used as a kid to ward away the monsters under the bed. Just turn on the lights and the monsters wither away. Just shine the light of public disclosure on these campaign tactics and they too may disappear.
Americans place great value in our freedom of speech. However, Americans also believe in taking responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes what one says.
When you try to hide behind a front group, or worse, hide behind a mish-mash of legal technicalities to do something you probably shouldn’t, people get resentful.
We make political candidates reveal who is funding their campaigns. We make political commercials disclose who paid for them. But sometimes people try to work their way around those laws, so that they can actively try to impact an election without revealing their identity or how much they have spent, by using a popular political masking agent, something referred to as a “527 committee.”
If you organize a political committee with a special tax status designated as a 527 group, you can fund electioneering activities under a special set of rules, and avoid the same sorts of limits that everyone else has to obey. North Carolina adopted some rules to help govern what sorts of electioneering activity these groups can engage in, which has reigned in some, but not all, 527 activity.
In many cases, 527s try to hide behind the mask of voter education to obscure what most reasonable people would call attempts to influence elections.
For example: the North Carolina Homeowners Alliance. Is this some sort of group of homeowners associations? No, it’s a 527 organization set up by the state’s real estate agents to “promote the interests of North Carolina homeowners.” Their main vehicle for this effort is a massive mail and telephone campaign they call “an issue advocacy program in Davie and Brunswick Counties” that, to me, seems to be about the issue of promoting certain candidates.
What is “an issues advocacy program?” The lobbyist for the Greensboro-based trade association, Timothy Kent, said in response to media inquiries that it was a way to “get information on issues of importance to [state residents] and be able to identify leaders who can make a difference." But Kent disputed that the goal of the 527 is to help certain candidates win election.
However, at their annual convention, the real estate agents were told their annual dues would go up to fund this effort, to allow them to “conduct ‘issue advocacy’ in select counties throughout the state where [they] hope to influence key elections through targeted mailings of positive information.”
Aren’t “influencing key elections” and “helping certain candidates win election” really the same thing? Or is this one of those technical loopholes were it depends on what the meaning of “is” is?
Now, why would they do this? Real estate agents are great folks. People generally respect them and they aren’t seen as dirty or shifty. People value their opinion on issues that affect the values of their real estate, and would likely listen to their views. Why hide behind a made-up name?
My real question is, why bother? Even if you can organize a special kind of committee and suddenly ignore the campaign laws that affect everyone else to channel money into these races, won’t the public reject such trickery when the lights come on? Won’t the specter of special interests trying to influence an election be too much of a risk to the candidates you support?
Maybe there’s something fun about putting on a mask and giving treats to candidates you like and playing tricks on candidates you don’t like. But when it comes to the serious business of electing our government officials, can’t we leave the hide-and-seek and make-believe games to the kids?
Chris Heagarty is the executive director of the N.C. Center for Voter Education, a Raleigh-based nonprofit and nonpartisan organization dedicated to improving elections in North Carolina.
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