As I blogged before here and here I sued the Amendment 48 campaign for late filings and anonymous donations. And, we won. That's right, the backers of the egg-mendment, tried to explain their way out of late filings and coverups of anonymous donations over the limit and were smacked down. Below is the pertinent paragraph of the judge's ruling (pdf).
The Committee violated the reporting reporting requirements of Colo. Const. art. XXVIII, §7 and § 1-45-108l C.R.S. of the FCPA by filing late reports of expenditures on three occasions, and vilolated § 1-45-108 and Secretary of State Rule 3.9.b by accepting two anonymous donations of more than $20 rather than forward these donations to a charitable organization or State Treasurer within 30 days. A penalty of $150 is imposed against the Committee for these violations. The Committee shall remit the penalty to the Secretary of State within 30 days of the issuance of this decision.
Their defense was based on one thing, innocent, young, Kristi Burton and showing she was meeting "substantial compliance" of the law. There were two problems with this. First, at the time of filing my complaint (pdf linked to here), the registered agent was the mother Debra Burton. And thus it was Mrs. Burton who should have been responsible for all aspects of campaign finance. However, just as my complaint nudged them to correct campaign finance reports as best they could, the registered agent was changed to Ms. Burton. If the judge picked up on this, I don't know.
One of her excuses for late filing is listed on page 4 of the ruling: ...Ms Burton explained that she attempted to complete the report early because she was leaving for the Labor Day holiday {to go to the RNC Convention]. However, she encountered difficulty completing a new data field, and had to wait until after she retunred before she could obtain instruction from the Secretary of State's office and complete the report.
The "new field" appeared because we were now within 60 days of a general election and thus "electioneering communications" must be documented as such. This is a person who is doing a distance learning program (over the computer) to get her law degree and she doesn't know how to put "colorado electioneering communications" into teh google? If I do that, the first hit is to a SOS form to file such disclosures on paper. The 6th hit is a page by the Sos describing exactly what an electioneering communication is.
Next, in putting Ms. Burton on the stand, her lawyer got to have her explain how hard running a campaign is, explain how difficult it was to understand the campaign finance rules, etc, etc. If this were a televised presidential debate I would have to have been careful to not roll my eyes. One of the excuses given for filing expenditures late was that she thought the most important thing to file were donations and to file them on time. She did not have an explanation as to where this assumption came from. At one point my lawyer (Pat Steadman who is partners in the firm that is working to defeat Amendment 48, who'd you think I was gonna get) asked Ms. Burton about the steps she took to understand Colorado's campaign finance law. Amazingly, this 3rd year law student admitted she didn't read the actual laws on the books. She only read the SOS's rules (which spell it out pretty well anyway).
As I noted before, had she read the law she might see that previous lawsuits have resulted in the following note inserted in 1-45-108: Act is neither unconstitutionally vague nor unconstitutionally overbroad. As to candidate's vagueness argument, court finds that act provides sufficient notice to persons of ordinary intelligence that expenditures, regardless of the source of the funds, must be reported. Yes, the law is calling you stupid.
It should also be noted that the lawyer who represented the Committee, Michael J. Norton (pdf) is the main litigator working for the Alliance Defense Fund. He was the goto guy advising churches how they can and cannot talk about political issues: Michael J. Norton, "Guide for Political Activities of Churches and Pastors," Alliance Defense Fund (undated),
copy on file) I don't find a problem with this. Rather, it's what I would have expected. After all, look who I got to help me try this. However, in our case, we just had to make copies of the campaign finance reports. They had to change registered agents and put together a case to argue substantial compliance. So, while the fine of $150 won't break their campaign, they did have to spin their wheels to defend this.
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