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...
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.
In...
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 it...
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 Court...
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...
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 of...
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 more...
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...
The first stage of the impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s abuses of office, now complete, has revealed how career diplomats were troubled by the ability of Igor Fruman, Lev Parnas, and Rudy Giuliani to help engineer a corrupt shadow foreign policy in Ukraine.
“How could our system fail like this? How is it that foreign corrupt interests...
Ethical concerns have plagued the Interior Department since former lobbyist David Bernhardt took a top spot at the agency, and they do not seem to be going away anytime soon.
A trove of recently-published emails between Bernhardt, while he was still Deputy Secretary, and the agency’s ethics staff offer an inside look into the flaws in Interior’s...
President Trump was ordered by a New York court to personally pay $2 million in damages for improperly using the Trump Foundation to support his 2016 presidential run. Those same activities also implicate campaign finance law.
Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a supplemental complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on Nov. 21, 2019...
Campaign Legal Center (CLC) released findings from two bipartisan polls where voters expressed overwhelming support for increased transparency in election related contributions and for the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to take a more active role in enforcing campaign finance laws.
Voters have a right to know which wealthy special interests are...
Rudy Giuliani has been tasked with conducting U.S. foreign policy while retaining unknown private clients, and should be subject to the conflict of interest and other ethics laws that apply to federal employees.
A new letter sent by Campaign Legal Center to the State Department’s Inspector General requests an investigation into Giuliani and his...
Campaign Legal Center and the League of Women Voters sent a letter on Nov. 8, 2019 to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger expressing grave concerns regarding the planned purge of over 300,000 Georgia voters from the voter registration list. The letter also outlines potential violations of federal and state law.
The letter urges Secretary...
Campaign Legal Center (CLC) and partners filed a lawsuit in 2018 on behalf of all late-jailed voters in Ohio seeking access to the ballot and the ability to exercise their right to vote. This resulted in CLC’s clients being allowed to vote in the 2018 midterm elections, but CLC still worked to ensure that the state’s practice would no longer be...
On her way out of office, Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen appears to have used campaign funds for a family trip to Disney and for thousands of dollars of expenditures at luxury hotels in New York and Miami.
Campaign Legal Center (CLC) has asked the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to investigate this apparent violation of the ban on the...
Campaign Legal Center (CLC) and End Citizens United filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC), alleging that during the 2018 election, President Trump’s “approved” super PAC, America First Action (AFA), made up to $6.6 million in illegally coordinated expenditures supporting Rep. Pete Sessions in Texas, and U.S. Senate candidates...
In an op-ed published in The Washington Post, Campaign Legal Center’s Trevor Potter and Delaney Marsco explain why the lack of transparency surrounding Rudy Giuliani’s income is a problem, and why the financial disclosure ordinarily required for individuals representing the U.S. government is so important.
“Giuliani has confirmed that he was paid...