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Clean Elections head says ruling backs up complaint
Jeremy Duda//September 9, 2014
Clean Elections Executive Director Tom Collins said a recent court ruling on what constitutes electioneering confirms his findings that a group that ran ads against Scott Smith in the governor’s race violated campaign laws.
Collins recommended that the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission find that the Legacy Foundation Action Fund, a nonprofit group, violated campaign finance laws by not registering as an independent expenditure committee or filing campaign finance reports. He rejected the group’s defense that it was not required to file as a committee because the ads it ran against Smith were “issue advocacy” and not related to his campaign for governor.
This isn’t the first time Collins found LFAF in violation of campaign finance laws. But he urged the commission not to act on a similar finding in late July because he was still awaiting a pertinent court ruling.
That ruling came in August, when the Arizona Court of Appeals ruled against another committee that used a similar argument. That group, the Committee for Justice and Fairness, ran ads in 2010 against Tom Horne, then a candidate for attorney general, criticizing him for actions he took while in the Legislature and while serving as state schools superintendent, and urged voters to contact his office to register their complaints.
Collins said the Court of Appeals ruling confirmed that a group such as LFAF doesn’t have to mention an election or a person’s candidacy in order for an advertisement to constitute “express advocacy” in an election.
LFAF’s ad criticized Smith for role with the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The ads ran shortly before Smith resigned his presidency of the group and stepped down as mayor of Mesa in April.
Collins noted that the appellate court determined that there was no way a “reasonable person” would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars asking voters to complain to Horne about actions he took in an office that he was about to vacate. He applied the same reasoning to LFAF.
