Sunday, October 28, 2012
Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS
When the story of the 2012 election is written, much attention likely will be devoted to how the outcome was affected by the flood of campaign cash from donors who don’t have to identify themselves or adhere to contribution limits.
Back in the day – say, a couple of years ago– even those who advocated for removing limits on campaign donations usually called for rigorous public disclosure of contributors as a basic tenet of democracy.
But after a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings, critics say America now has the worst of both worlds: no limits on campaign contributions and no requirements to disclose who is giving. Thus, more than $200 million of what some call “dark money” is paying for TV ads in Ohio and other political battlegrounds — and voters cannot tell who is bankrolling the effort to influence them.
“This whole outside spending created by the Supreme Court is an unmitigated disaster for the American people,” said campaign-finance watchdog Fred Wertheimer.
“It is basically allowing millionaires and billionaires to have a disproportionate influence over our elections and a potential corrupting influence over government decisions.”
This new frontier could give foreign entities and even countries an entree into financially influencing U.S. elections — something that is strictly forbidden under campaign-finance laws, Wertheimer said.
While the overwhelming majority of the undisclosed cash is flowing into the presidential campaign, Ohio’s U.S. Senate race is getting about $1 of every $20 — which ranks it behind only the Senate contest in Virginia, the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics has calculated. Virtually all has gone to oppose Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown.
Of the $27.5 million in outside money the Brown campaign says is targeting the incumbent, about $24 million comes from groups that do not have to reveal their contributors. Brown has gotten about $550,000 from a dark-money group.
“Ohio, more than any other state in the union, is being overwhelmed with campaign advertising,” Wertheimer said. “It’s a great deal for the local television stations and the media advisers who are making a fortune off this. It’s not such a good deal for the citizens of Ohio or for any other state where this is going on.”