The day after conservative political leader and Arizona resident Charlie Kirk was assassinated, leaders from Christian, conservative and libertarian non-profits stood outside the Arizona Supreme Court with a sign.
“STOP DONOR DOXING,” it read.
Attorneys and leaders spoke, sometimes through tears, about Kirk — and how his death underscored the need to allow people to make anonymous donations to political campaigns.
The state’s high court had just heard arguments over whether to overturn the broadly popular Voters’ Right to Know Act. The law, passed in 2022 by 72% of voters, requires groups that spend $50,000 or more on statewide elections to identify original donors who gave at least $5,000. The groups assembled outside wanted the court to find it unconstitutional.
“A U.S. citizen was murdered yesterday in cold blood because he talked about issues on which people disagree,” Jon Riches, vice president of litigation at Goldwater Institute, said, referring to Kirk.
Dark money: Arizonans said ‘no’ to secret political donations. They could be overruled
Andrew Gould, a former Arizona Supreme Court justice representing the groups, said, “what this law does is it takes people who want to anonymously express themselves through organizations that will speak on their behalf. It denies them that right. It strips them of their anonymity, and it exposes them to retaliation — from violence, to economic retaliation to social ostracism.”
The effect, Gould said, is people “will self-censor. They will not contribute. We will have less speech.“
Scot Mussi, president of Arizona Free Enterprise Club, said donors weren’t afraid of everyday people but rather the “activist organizations” and “politicians.” He said Kirk’s Turning Point USA was the subject of official complaints by “people out there wanting to get ahold of their donors.”
‘The public has the right to know’
Those complaints came from former Republican state lawmaker Rich Crandall and Balz School District Governing Board Member Jacob George. The two filed complaints to the Arizona Citizens’ Clean Election Commission saying Turning Point entities failed to report spending in local races in Mesa.
Crandall declined to comment. George, 21, said he filed the complaint because “people need to be held accountable.”
“If you are afraid, you probably shouldn’t be doing it,” George said about anonymous donations. He said he didn’t believe in political violence and that he would have no plans to do anything if he received a list of Turning Point’s big donors. The point, he said, was the public has the right to know who’s behind election spending, and Turning Point should have to pay the state “a large fee” if they, in fact, violated the law.
Turning Point PAC’s attorney, Eric Spencer of the firm Snell & Wilmer, told the Citizens’ Clean Election Commission that the complaint from George was without merit.
More: Turning Point PAC faces campaign finance complaint in Mesa
Information required about donors because of the Arizona 2022 law includes their name, address and employer. Those details are reported by the organizations that receive the donations and then spend the money to influence elections. Some of the organizations historically weren’t required to disclose donors, such as social welfare non-profit organizations. The disclosures are then published online by the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office.
It’s the same personal information disclosed when a donor gives any amount directly to a political candidate or their campaign, as required under Arizona’s Constitution.
During oral arguments at the Arizona Supreme Court, attorney Eric Fraser, who argued on behalf of the state, didn’t deny political violence occurred in the country. But he said Arizona has long had campaign finance disclosure, and there was no evidence it led to threats.
“We’ve had disclosure in Arizona for more than a century. City of Phoenix has had disclosure of original source contributions for many years. … We just went through an election cycle where Prop. 211 was in effect,” Fraser said. “We don’t have evidence here or anywhere else that campaign finance disclosures result in these kinds of threats.”
Does campaign finance disclosure result lead to political violence?
It is difficult to find research quantifying any connection between campaign finance disclosure and threats, harassment or violence. Most of what is known about any such connection is anecdotal.
Research from Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank, has shown political violence is rare in the United States. Except for the Sept. 11 terrorist attack in 2001, “there isn’t an obvious recent spike in politically motivated terrorism,” policy scholar Alex Nowrasteh wrote.
Nowrasteh told The Arizona Republic he had seen “no evidence” in his data that campaign finance disclosure “has any impact on violence.” His data included roughly 3,600 instances of politically motivated murder in the U.S. since 1975, including Kirk’s assassination.
Brad Smith, chairman of Institute for Free Speech and former commissioner at the Federal Election Commission, has pointed to the harrassment of a Trump donor in 2019. Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro shared online a list of 44 donors and their employers who contributed the maximum allowed amount to Trump’s re-election campaign.
One of the donors reportedly received a voicemail from someone calling him a “scumbag” with “no (expletive) worth.” The person who left the voicemail promised to post the person’s phone number “all over the internet.”
Smith also cited “boycotts of SoulCycle and Equinox after the chairman of their parent company, real estate developer Stephen Ross, decided to host a fundraiser for Trump.”
Politically aligned Supreme Court Justices have disagreed over the importance of anonymity in public debate.
The late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said, “Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed.” He said he didn’t look forward to a society with anonymous campaigning, “hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism. This does not resemble the Home of the Brave.”
Justice Clarence Thomas, by contrast, has said, “I cannot endorse a view of the First Amendment that subjects citizens of this nation to death threats, ruined careers, damaged or defaced property, or preemptive and threatening warning letters as the price for engaging in ‘core political speech.'”
Taylor Seely is a First Amendment Reporting Fellow at The Arizona Republic / azcentral.com. Do you have a story about the government infringing on your First Amendment rights? Reach her at tseely@arizonarepublic.com or by phone at 480-476-6116.
Seely’s role is funded through a collaboration between the Freedom Forum and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editorial input.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kirk’s shooting shows need to end Arizona ‘dark money’ ban, groups say