A pair of freshman legislators from rival parties pushed bills through the same committee Wednesday that were aimed at injecting more transparency into state election laws.
Rep. Jana Della Rosa, R-Rogers, guided House Bill 1233, which would require campaign finance reports be submitted in digital form to the secretary of state, through the House State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Despite failing on a vote in the morning, Rep. Clarke Tucker, D-Little Rock, returned to the same committee in the afternoon and got HB1425 approved.
That bill aims to end unfettered spending by outside groups by making "coordinated" campaign ads paid by outside groups but directly involving a candidate count as a campaign contributions and be subject to state limits.
Della Rosa's bill would put Arkansas' campaign-reporting requirements in line with laws in other states where candidates for statewide and district offices must put their campaign reports into an easily searchable electronic system that can more easily be sorted and analyzed by the public.
Currently, candidates are only required to submit paper reports, which can be hundreds of pages long.
"In Arkansas right now, you can see everything granular. I can see what a specific candidate has done very easily ... but it's the top line, 30,000-foot view that's hard to see," Della Rosa said. "Right now, [the money] is relatively hidden. Unless you really want to go after it and are willing to spend the amount of time it takes to search literally 9,500 reports, you're not going to see that."
Added Della Rosa,"You'll know how the money flows in Arkansas, and right now you don't."
HB1425 originally set out to place the state's $2,000 contribution limits on coordinated campaign ads as well as require that outside groups paying for independent ads in Arkansas disclose the source of their funding, failed in a committee vote on Monday.
Opponents were worried that the disclosure requirement interfered with a donor's privacy rights.
Tucker stripped out the half of his bill that addressed the outside groups and believed that would be enough to pass the bill Wednesday morning.
He was wrong, though, at least in the morning. Tucker said he thinks the committee was confused about what the amended version of his bill did.
HB1425, if it makes it through the House and then the Senate, would address a campaign ad from the 2014 attorney general's race that resulted in an ethics complaint against Attorney General Leslie Rutledge.
In that ad, Rutledge appeared on camera and told voters to support her in her fight against government intrusion from Washington, D.C.
The ad was paid for by the Republican Attorneys General Association, a national group that spent more than $300,000 on running the ad.
The ethics complaint argued that Rutledge violated the $2,000 gift limit in state law, but the commission dismissed the complaint, saying that since Rutledge didn't expressly tell voters to vote for her.
HB1425 would allow coordinated ads like Rutledge's to run, but they would face the same $2,000 contribution limits.
"Virtually, [coordination] does away with the contribution limit because an entity can spend however much money they want, have the candidate featured on their [ads]," Tucker said. "The public has a right to know who supports candidates who are elected to office to the extent that it can affect our conduct in office."
Metro on 03/26/2015