[EL] LATimes: Cash comes too late for debate

[David A. Holtzman]

One of the interests often advanced as a reason for campaign finance 
disclosure is voters’ interest in knowing who is for or against 
something on the ballot.(Never mind the conflict with the norm of having 
secret ballots.)Disclosure of donations and (so-called) independent 
spending lets voters connect propositions and candidates with donors and 
spenders, making voters’ decisions easier if they really like or really 
don’t like the donors or spenders.

Today’s LATimes (page B2) has an article about late disclosure 
<http://www.latimes.com/local/cityhall/la-me-analysis-hidden-money-20150316-story.html> 
as a way of preventing voter backlash.I didn’t see it in today’s [EL] 
digest, and since disclosure is a topic of great interest here, I’ve 
linked to it in the sentence above.

The article focuses on L.A.’s recent city elections, particularly the 
campaign for “Charter Amendments 1 and 2, which changed L.A.’s election 
dates and gave some officials an extra 18 months in office.”It quotes a 
political consultant saying “it's ‘not normal’ to have such a large 
volume of contributions during the last 48 hours of the campaign.‘You 
can't spend that kind of money in that kind of a time frame in any 
useful way, unless you knew it was coming in.’”

- dah


-- 
David A. Holtzman, M.P.H., J.D.
david at holtzmanlaw.com

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