| Subject: list housekeeping/news of the day 2/9/04 |
| From: Rick Hasen |
| Date: 2/9/2004, 7:44 AM |
| To: election-law |
Just a reminder to keep your virus software up to date. In the last
few weeks, Dan Lowenstein and I, as managers of the list, have received
hundreds of messages bounced from the Loyola listserver attempting to
send a virus to the list. You will recall that one of these messages
got through last week. (The message, though it appeared to come from
list member Ned Foley, in fact did not come from him.)
And while we are on the subject of bounce messages, please be sure
that your accounts do not go over quota. Many of you have your e-mail
forwarded to a second account, and let that account go over quota.
When that happens, Dan and I receive an error message each time someone
posts to the list and a message gets forwarded to an over-quota
account.
Please do what you can to keep our administrative time on this to a
minimum.
Thanks.
Roll Call offers this
report
(paid registration required). Perhaps the most interesting aspect of
the article is the fact that Senator McCain has come out against
fundraising by 527s intended to influence the outcome of federal
elections:
“These new groups, however, which have made clear that their purpose is to influence federal elections — they have not made any bones about it — have purportedly set up ‘non-federal’ accounts to accept corporate and labor union funds and large contributions from individuals,” McCain said. “They plan to use these monies, we are told, to finance partisan voter drives and run sham issue ads aimed at influencing the 2004 federal elections. This blatant end run around the campaign finance laws should not be tolerated.”
See this
report in the Dayton Daily News.
Presumably the Ohio law at issue is designed to prevent misleading
speech. Is it constitutional? Bill Marshall presented a very
interesting paper at the Penn symposium this weekend on the
constitutionality of regulating false campaign speech, and the
arguments for regulating false speech could perhaps be extended to
misleading speech as well. I have always been skeptical of laws
regulating misleading speech.
The Los Angeles Times offered this
report
on February 6 regarding the decision of the Federal Election Commission
to postpone consideration of an advisory opinion on the raising of
money by so-called 527 organizations. See also this
A.P. report from February 5.
Aaron Goode offers this column
in the Yale Daily News.
Dawn Turner Trice's Chicago Tribune column with this title
is here.
See also this
A.P. story. You can find links to my earlier coverage on the
constitutionality of this "Stand By Your Ad" provision of
McCain-Feingold here.
Dan Walters Sacramento Bee column with this title is here.
-- Rick Hasen Professor of Law and William M. Rains Fellow Loyola Law School 919 South Albany Street Los Angeles, CA 90015-1211 (213)736-1466 (213)380-3769 - fax rick.hasen@lls.edu http://www.lls.edu/academics/faculty/hasen.html http://electionlawblog.org