Voters in Montana approved a ban on political spending by corporations, nonprofits and other organizations, the Associated Press projected.
The ballot measure prohibits “artificial persons” that do business in Montana from spending money to influence local, state and federal elections. Violating the ban would result in them losing their ability to operate in the state.
The plan would not prevent individual megadonors from spending millions to influence elections, but it does stanch their ability to influence elections through nonprofits or other “dark money” groups that aren’t required to disclose their donors.
The so-called “Montana Plan” will all but certainly face legal challenges, mostly from conservative and libertarian free speech advocates who have fought similar efforts in states from Hawaii to Massachusetts.
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Montana is the base of a broader effort by the nonprofit Transparent Election Initiative to regulate spending in elections. Americans across the political spectrum are frustrated with the amount of money in politics, which they believe drowns out the voices of the average voter in favor of special interests.
The amount of money in American politics has exploded since 2010, when the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission allowed corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited funds to influence elections. The decision also gave rise to super PACs.
OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan nonprofit that tracks the flow of money in politics, estimates around $11.9 billion will be spent on federal elections this cycle.
That’s $1.7 billion more than political actors spent during the 2022 midterms — but still less than the National Retail Federation expected Americans to spend on Halloween this year, Owen Yeates, a senior attorney at the Institute for Free Speech, told The Washington Sun.
“Is it really too much to spend when we are deciding the people who are going to be governing us and setting the laws over us for the next two or four or six years?” Yeates said.
Yeates and the Institute for Free Speech filed a lawsuit in Hawaii earlier this year challenging a ban, signed into law in May by Democratic Gov. Josh Green, on corporate, nonprofit and union spending to influence state elections.
In September, the American Civil Liberties Union filed an amicus brief opposing the ban. The civil rights organization described the ban as “premised on an untenable theory of plenary government power over the speech rights of civil society organizations.”
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce also filed a lawsuit in September challenging the Hawaii ban, arguing it infringes upon the First Amendment right of Americans to band together to make their voices heard through associations or organizations.
“It should be left to us to be able to decide who we want to listen to, and not have the government tell us who we can hear,” Yeates told The Sun.
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