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Editorial: Ad campaign donors need disclosure before vote

Sat., Oct. 27, 2012

Education Voters of Idaho Inc. motto: “Just Don’t Study Up on Us.”

The organization is resisting the prying eyes of the state of Idaho, which would like to know who is doing the educating, and just where EVI’s $230,000 lesson plan came from.

The ad hoc organization stepped into the fight over Propositions 1, 2 and 3 by funding a media campaign advising Idaho voters not to overturn the education reform proposals championed by state Superintendent of Schools Tom Luna. The “Luna laws” forbid collective bargaining by teachers, impose a merit pay system, and require high school students to earn at least two credits online.

The virtues of silencing teachers on matters with which they are most familiar – class sizes and, yes, lesson planning – have always escaped us. Merit pay is fine, if the money is there to reward merit without further dinging a poorly paid teacher corps. And students with access to computers are online all the time. Might as well slip in some trigonometry, right?

But the fight over full disclosure is not about the substance of the Luna laws. It’s about Idaho’s Sunshine Law, which its educated voters enacted in 1974.

The law, in the wonderful language of the state’s lawsuit, “prohibits gamesmanship by which nested political committees string together a daisy chain of contributions and expenditures that hide the true contributors.”

The chain in this case being the fundraising by EVI, which turned over the loot to Parents for Education Reform, which has the same directors. Parents bought the advertising. EVI’s co-founder argues the 3-month-old organization is entitled to the same deference regarding disclosure that is given the Idaho Education Association, which dates to 1892 and has contributed to the anti-Luna campaign.

But the teachers group notes its money comes out of its treasury, not individual members. And its efforts on behalf of education have gone far beyond politics over the decades. EVI claims it has the same aspirations. The word that comes to mind is “malarkey.”

EVI has already blown off one deadline for filing the donor information. The state is seeking a temporary restraining order for full disclosure by Friday at the very latest. Any later, and the harm done the electoral process will be irreparable.

After an EVI bid to get the state’s suit heard in federal court, the two sides agreed to a hearing in state court Monday at 1:30 p.m. Not a moment too soon.

Secretary of State Ben Ysursa and Attorney General Lawrence Wasden deserve extra credit for pursuing this case. Luna is a fellow Republican, and they could have walked to court. Instead, they ran.

The people of Idaho deserve to know where that $230,000 came from. They, through Luna, are about to buy $180 million in laptop computers. The contract went to Hewlett-Packard Co., which got the contract when a bidding process failed to elicit any interest. That deal could use a little sunshine, too, even though HP has an excellent reputation.

Dummy organizations like Education Voters teach but one thing: cynicism.