Koch-connected group out to kill Outlaw Dirty Money and other initiatives Opinion: A group funded by billionaires Charles and David Koch already is hard at work trying to knock the Outlaw Dirty Money initiative off the ballot. But is Arizona Public Service involved?

Laurie Roberts | The Republic | azcentral.com

Well, that didn’t take long.

Last week, a bipartisan group filed the Outlaw Dirty Money initiative, hoping to unmask big money donors who run anonymous campaigns to get certain people elected in our state.

This week, a group funded by billionaires Charles and David Koch already is hard at work trying to knock the Outlaw Dirty Money initiative off the ballot.

In a blast email, Darla M. Gonzalez, field director for Americans for Prosperity, put out a call for volunteers to help check signatures on the dark money disclosure initiative as well as the InvestInEd and Clean Energy for a Healthy Arizona initiatives.

“UGH. So, as you probably know three BAD PROPS had enough signatures to get on the November ballot!” she wrote. “We are coordinating efforts with APS the Chamber and others to verify and validate these signatures.”

Is APS involved?

Arizona Public Service working with a Koch-connected group to fight efforts to stop secret campaigns? Who’d a thunk it?

Andrew Clark, state director of AFP, says it’s not true that APS is involved in the effort.

“We are trying to validate signatures for dark money, but APS is not a part of that,” he told me. “It’d be great if they were. I’d take money from anybody.”

Curious that his field director would announce that APS is involved if it isn’t.

I put a call in to APS for clarification. Crickets.

Makes sense that APS would be involved

Actually, it makes sense that the state’s largest utility would want to knock Outlaw Dirty Money off the ballot. It’s widely believed that APS secretly spent $3.2 million to get Tom Forese and Doug Little elected to Arizona Corporation Commission in 2014 – something the utility won’t talk about but has taken to court to keep under wraps.

Clark says Americans for Prosperity opposes dark money disclosure on First Amendment grounds.

“With donor disclosure in general, we think the right for anonymous free speech is a pretty fundamental freedom that we want to protect,” he said.

As if the First Amendment contemplates a powerful utility being able to secretly pour millions into political campaigns for utility regulators -- to, in essence, select the people who will set the size of its profits and your electric bill.

I’m guessing it’ll be a landslide if voters are allowed to vote on the Outlaw Dirty Money initiative.

Will Outlaw Dirty Money survive?

Sadly, Team Secrecy has a pretty good shot at bouncing it off the ballot.

The Outlaw Dirty Money campaign turned in 285,768 signatures but it needs 225,963 of them to be valid in order to make the Nov. 6 ballot.

That’s going to be tough, thanks to Gov. Doug Ducey and the Legislature.

You may recall that last year our leaders passed laws making it more difficult to mount an initiative and easier to knock initiatives off the ballot. Operation Silence Our Citizens, I called it.

Under the new rules, initiative campaigns must now strictly comply with the law, meaning that petitions can be tossed out for petty reasons.

It means a petition signed by a quarter of a million voters could be knocked off the ballot because the margins are a quarter inch off or the print is too small (or too big). Or maybe because an address didn’t include whether it was a street or a road.

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Under the old “substantial compliance” requirement, such things didn’t affect a voter’s ability to understand what he or she was signing and thus didn’t matter.

It’s difficult to know how the courts will apply the higher “strict compliance” standard. The Arizona Court of Appeals has said that strict compliance means “nearly perfect compliance.”

A standard, by the way, that politicians haven’t applied to themselves. Their nominating petitions still are held to the lower “substantial compliance” standard.

Why do they need secrecy for that?

The Outlaw Dirty Money initiative would require any non-profit spending more than $10,000 on a political campaign to disclose all donors who contributed at least $2,500.

For those who wonder how anybody could be against sunshine in election, here’s how the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity sums up the initiative:

“This would require any expenditure more than $10k in a two year period to a candidate or a ballot measure to have to disclose their donors down the individual names,” AFP Field Director Gonzalez wrote. “This would severely limit our ability to be involved in future statewide initiatives or hold elected officials accountable.”

My question: Why is secrecy needed to be involved in statewide initiatives? And why on earth is it needed to hold elected officials accountable?

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com.

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