Campaign Legal Center (CLC) has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) alleging that Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign committee and the super PAC VoteVets violated the law by unlawfully coordinating up to $639,000 in ad spending in advance of the Nevada caucus.
On February 5, 2020, a senior Buttigieg campaign official...
In the wake of a court’s denial of his motion to dismiss, the Secretary of State has agreed to settle a federal voting rights lawsuit brought by two Native American Tribes and several individual voters over North Dakota’s voter ID law.
The law requires voters to present identification listing their residential street address – a substantial...
The Supreme Court opened the floodgates to corporate political spending with the 2010 decision Citizens United v. FEC. But Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, promised that transparency of political spending would act as a check on corruption.
“With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide...
For the first time, the State of Maine joins numerous municipal jurisdictions across the U.S. in using ranked choice voting all of its primary and general elections.
Ranked choice voting (RCV), also known as instant runoff voting, asks voters to rank the candidates for an office in order of preference; then, when results are tallied, the votes...
A newly-created Hawaii Limited Lability Corporation (LLC) appears to have illegally laundered $150,000 in funds from unknown sources to a Maine super PAC supporting U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, new campaign finance records show.
The facts are strikingly similar to those that led to the arrest of Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman.
The Society of Young...
Voters have a right to know which special interests are spending big money to influence their votes. In Santa Fe, the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico agreed and upheld the city’s transparency law.
Santa Fe’s transparency ordinance requires basic disclosure from those spending money to support or oppose ballot measures in...
Asking foreign governments for dirt on political rivals is entirely permissible, and might even be good for democracy, President Trump’s lawyer told the Senate on Wednesday.
“Mere information is not something that would violate the campaign finance laws,” deputy White House counsel Pat Philbin argued at the president’s impeachment trial.
I...
Campaign Legal Center (CLC) co-director of voting rights and redistricting Danielle Lang appeared before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit to highlight the injustice of using wealth-based discrimination to stop hundreds of thousands of people from voting.
Florida’s anti-voter law, passed in the summer of 2019, has made...
As the 2020 Census gets underway, the Census Bureau should be giving its undivided attention to the task of counting every U.S. resident. Instead, the Bureau is trying to juggle that massive undertaking with a separate project that will likely do much more harm than good: gathering records from state governments to help estimate the number of adult...
Tuesday marks the 10-year anniversary of Citizens United v. FEC, a decision that has led to an explosion in secret spending in our elections, and rigged politics in favor of special interests.
CLC’s Adav Noti explains the case’s impact in this video.
America’s broken campaign finance system largely stems from misguided U.S. Supreme...
The failure of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) is one of the best-kept secrets in Washington, and one of the most shameful.
To ensure that the 2020 elections are transparent and fair, the President and Senate must prioritize restoring the FEC’s quorum. This is more important than ever as the country enters what promises to be the most...
It is Jan. 8, 2020. One year ago today, Amendment 4 was implemented in Florida, a transformative legal change that elevated a class of citizens with felony convictions and promised to restore voting rights to approximately 1.5 million people through a new provision in the state constitution. This was made possible because of a vote that took place...
Join us on February 3, 2020 from 4-6 PM at Jenner & Block, LLP for a conversation between CLC President Trevor Potter and Rick Hasen, Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine and author of Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy.
This event is open to the...
When the public financing program for county elections in Montgomery County, Maryland was implemented for the first time in the 2018 elections, 35 of the 57 county election candidates chose to participate in the program, and of the 35 candidates that participated, 24 candidates qualified for matching funds.
Contributing to candidates is an...
Fair Fight Action and Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed an emergency court motion asking for a temporary restraining order that would prevent Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger from moving forward with the state’s plans to illegally purge 120,561 Georgia voters from the rolls.
These people are being removed solely because they have chosen not...
In response to a Campaign Legal Center complaint, the Interior Department Inspector General concluded this week that a top official violated federal ethics rules when he took meetings with his former employer.
That employee was Doug Domenech, Interior’s Assistant Secretary for Insular and International Affairs. Prior to joining government...
North Dakota legislators are studying the implementation of a new constitutional mandate that could make their state a leader in election spending transparency.
At its most recent meeting, the state legislature's interim Judiciary Committee heard testimony from experts about the problem of secret election spending in North Dakota and throughout...
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear has said he “will sign an executive order that automatically restores voting rights for Kentuckians who complete their sentences after being convicted of a nonviolent felony.”
This would be a major victory for the rights restoration movement, but the order must be well-crafted to meet its goals.
Kentucky has one...
The New York State attorney general issued a subpoena for documents related to the National Rifle Association (NRA)’s illegal coordination scheme, which Campaign Legal Center documented in complaints filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
In 2018, Campaign Legal Center, together with Giffords, filed four separate complaints with the...
Campaign Legal Center (CLC) launched DemocracyU: A Toolkit for Action in Your Community to help policymakers and concerned citizens learn more about solutions to the biggest threats to our democracy.
As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said, states are the laboratories of democracy, experimenting with new ideas that might deliver a...
In 1965, Congress passed a bill that would change the course of this country’s history and the shape of our democracy forever. That bill was the Voting Rights Act, or the VRA. For almost 50 years, the VRA protected the political voices of voters of color and ensured all voters could participate in the democratic system. Those protections, though...