WASHINGTON – Plaintiffs in North Carolina’s partisan gerrymandering challenge, League of Women Voters of North Carolina v. Rucho, filed a motion with the U.S. Supreme Court today asking the court to affirm the lower court’s ruling that found the entire state’s plan to be an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. In February, the Supreme Court denied expedited briefing in the case, but it still has the ability to affirm the district court’s decision and order fair maps to be drawn in the state soon thereafter.

The Campaign Legal Center (CLC) the Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ), and University of Chicago Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos represent plaintiffs in the case. They jointly filed the brief on behalf of their clients, the League of Women Voters of North Carolina and 12 individual North Carolina voters.   

“The district court unanimously and correctly found that North Carolina lawmakers manipulated the state’s congressional voting maps to lock in their own political party’s power, with little regard for the will of voters,” said Paul Smith, vice president at CLC, who argued CLC’s landmark partisan gerrymandering case out of Wisconsin, Gill v. Whitford, before the Supreme Court on October 3. “North Carolina has one of the most severely gerrymandered maps in modern American history. North Carolina voters have endured three election cycles with a skewed congressional map. The Supreme Court must affirm the lower court’s ruling, because even a single election under an unconstitutional map is one too many.”

"The congressional maps drawn in North Carolina would be unconstitutional under virtually any meaningful legal standard the court adopts," said Allison Riggs, senior voting rights attorney for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. "We are hopeful that the court will recognize the glaring unconstitutionality of the plan and affirm the lower court's ruling.

Evidence presented at trial in 2017 demonstrated that the Republican plan to use political data in drawing this map to gain partisan advantage worked exactly as expected. In the 2016 election, Republican congressional candidates in North Carolina won ten out of thirteen seats, even though the statewide vote was nearly tied and North Carolina is a purple state. An expert that examined the map determined that the North Carolina plan exhibited the largest partisan bias of any congressional map in the country.

This term, the Supreme Court will decide CLC’s case challenging Wisconsin’s state assembly map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. CLC and co-counsel represent 11 Wisconsin voters in the landmark case, Gill v. Whitford. The federal district court in North Carolina applied the same tests for measuring partisan symmetry as were applied in the Wisconsin case, indicating that there is a manageable way to consistently measure what constitutes an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander

Read more about the case League of Women Voters of North Carolina v. Rucho.

WASHINGTON – Today, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) announced that the agency will begin reviewing campaign disclosure reports to determine whether former candidates and officeholders are illegally using leftover campaign money for personal purposes, after Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a petition for rulemaking on Feb. 5, 2018. A bombshell investigation by the Tampa Bay Times and WTSP revealed how common it is for former officeholders to continue using campaign funds long after candidates left office, stopped campaigning, or died, on expenses like country club dues, expensive flights and hotels, and cell phone bills.

“We applaud the FEC for taking action to crack down on the ‘zombie campaign’ phenomenon,” said Adav Noti, senior director, trial litigation at CLC and former associate general counsel for policy at the FEC. “It is not in the public interest for campaign accounts to turn into personal slush funds for former candidates. While enforcing the existing rules on the use of campaign funds is a big step in the right direction, the FEC will also need to clarify and strengthen those rules to properly address this widespread problem.”

Today’s announcement from the FEC commits the FEC to ensuring that campaign funds are only used to support one’s candidacy and duties as an officeholder. That means that once a person is no longer a candidate or officeholder, the allowable uses of campaign funds become more limited.

CLC has brought this issue to the attention of the FEC with the rulemaking petition as well as two legal complaints in the past year pointing to egregious examples of former lawmakers or their campaign staff converting funds to personal use.

• October 2017: Retired Congressman Cliff Stearns still has an active campaign account despite leaving office in 2013. CLC filed a complaint because Stearns was using apparently illegal campaign expenditures to pay for his monthly cellphone bill, payments to his wife, membership dues at private Washington D.C. clubs, and expenses apparently related to his private sector lobbying career.
• January 2018: CLC filed a complaint concerning the treasurer of the late-Congressman Mark Takai’s campaign committee, who paid himself more than $100,000 after Takai’s passing to “consult” the campaign.
• February 2018: CLC files a rulemaking petition asking the FEC to revise and amend regulations pertaining to the personal use of campaign funds as they apply to former candidates and officeholders.
• March 2018: the FEC published a notice of availability in the Federal Register regarding CLC’s rulemaking petition.

Research recommends solutions like Honest Ads Act, which would extend disclosure requirements to all major ad platforms, helping root out foreign interference

WASHINGTON – Today, CLC and Issue One, in conjunction with University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Young Mie Kim and her team, Project DATA (Digital Ad Tracking & Analysis), published the results of a first-of-its-kind, peer-reviewed research of Facebook political ads in the 2016 elections. The study by Professor Kim and her team provides compelling support for the Honest Ads Act, bipartisan legislation that has been endorsed by tech companies including Facebook and Twitter that would help root out foreign interference in U.S. elections and make digital advertisers more accountable.

Professor Kim and her team captured and analyzed five million paid ads on Facebook in the weeks ahead of the 2016 elections, and their peer-reviewed study is forthcoming in the journal Political Communication. This research is the first, large-scale, systematic empirical analysis that investigates Facebook political advertising.

Of the 228 groups that purchased political ads about hot-button political issues in the weeks before the 2016 elections, 121 were identified by Professor Kim and her team as “suspicious” — which means that there was no publicly available information about nearly half of the sponsors of Facebook ads featuring hot-button political issues in the weeks before the 2016 elections. In this research, suspicious groups are unidentifiable, untrackable groups that have no public footprints. Professor Kim and her team identified a group as suspicious if no information about the group was found elsewhere, even after her team reviewed the Federal Election Commission, IRS-based databases, and other research databases.

A quarter of the ads the research examined mentioned candidates, and would be subject to disclosure requirements if aired on TV, but escaped those transparency measures because they were run online.

This secrecy would not be possible on broadcast. While social media companies have proposed new transparency measures, the Honest Ads Act would solidify disclosure requirements by moving the law into the 21st century. The bipartisan legislation aims to ensure that digital political ads are subject to the same transparency requirements that apply to similar ads run on any other medium. The bill would shine a spotlight on some of the digital advertising practices outlined in the Project DATA study by creating a public footprint. 

“As this peer-reviewed study demonstrates, secretive groups were able to run tens of thousands of digital political ads without detection because of massive loopholes in our campaign finance laws,” said Brendan Fischer, director, federal reform program at CLC. “This study demonstrates the importance of Congress addressing campaign finance law’s internet blind spot. The protection of American elections from foreign interference cannot be left to voluntary measures by tech companies.”

One-sixth of the “suspicious” advertisers turned out to be Kremlin-linked Russian groups, according to Project DATA’s analysis of information released by the House Intelligence Committee. Additionally, the peer-reviewed study found that voters in swing states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania were disproportionately targeted with ads featuring divisive issues like guns, immigration, and race relations. These included ads that raised anger or fear, or emphasized the divides between subgroups of the population. Some of these ads were sponsored by nonprofits that did not file a disclosure report to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) about the source of their funding.

"We have seen clear evidence that when left unchecked, foreign actors seeking to affect U.S. politics will use — and abuse — any tool at their disposal. It is time for digital platforms to be held to the same common-sense, simple rules that govern disclosure of television and radio ads," said Issue One Executive Director Meredith McGehee. "The 21st century realities of online political advertising have overwhelmed our country's capacity to hold rule-breakers accountable. The Honest Ads Act would begin to fix this problem." 

The Honest Ads Act was endorsed last week by Facebook and Twitter, but has yet to receive a hearing.

Read a press-friendly repackaged report of the research.

* The underlying study initially identified 122 “suspicious” groups. One group was erroneously placed in this category. The correct number is 121.   ​