Allow Campaign Gifts Of Any Size, State Group Says Donations Would Have To Be Reported Within 24 Hours

Washington state’s five-year-old campaign finance law makes it harder for the public to know who’s spending money on elections, says a nonpartisan group.

The Washington Council for Fair Elections is proposing a set of changes that it says would make candidates and contributors more accountable.

“I dare you to find someone who says the current system is working,” said Ed Zuckerman, executive director of the Washington Conservation Voters and a member of the council.

The council - a volunteer group with members from business, organized labor, government and academia - spent the last year studying the state’s election process.

It concluded that Initiative 134, the campaign finance law that voters approved in 1992, has not reduced the amount of money spent on elections.

Instead, the group said, it has led to increases in spending by political parties, which must adhere to less strict limits, and by independent committees, which have no limits on what they can spend.

The council proposes eliminating the limits on what a person, business or union can give to a candidate. In return, the candidate would have to report his or her contributions within 24 hours.

That may seem to fly in the face of conventional wisdom that says people want to see less money in politics, said Ken Alhadeff, a member of the council. But the group’s studies indicate that conventional wisdom is wrong, he said.

“People aren’t so upset about how much money is given; it’s just ‘Tell me who’s giving it,”’ Alhadeff said.

Candidates would be eligible for public funding if they agree not to take contributions from private sources.

Independent expenditure committees would face strict regulations on how they receive money. Transfers between political action committees would be banned.

Independent committees would have to make their advertising available for public inspection within 24 hours of distributing it and would have to report immediately any contributions received within 21 days of an election.

Independent committees could not be formed less than 21 days before an election.

Independent committees spent heavily in the 1996 state elections, as business groups set up some two dozen committees, transferred money among them, then mailed out ads in support of Republican candidates.

Although the council’s report links the rise of independent committees to the new contribution limits, the recent Spokane municipal elections show the two are not always connected.

There are no contribution limits for city candidates, yet three groups spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to influence voters in the mayor’s race.

Zuckerman said independent campaigns are “a genie that’s out of the bottle” and the council’s proposals won’t put it back in.

But faster, more complete disclosure of who is spending the money for a campaign will help improve political debate, he said.

“One of the most insidious sides of the independent movement is … that the more removed they are (from public view), the more scurrilous their attacks seem to be,” he said.

Alhadeff, a Seattle businessman, said he expects the proposals to be fashioned into an initiative campaign for which signatures would be collected beginning early next year.

The group will not pay people to gather signatures for the initiative, he said. If the voters want these changes, gathering signatures shouldn’t be a problem.

“Hopefully, it will have a snowball effect,” Alhadeff said. “We’ll find out when we take it to the people.”

, DataTimes