Transparency in elections is essential for citizens to cast an informed vote and meaningfully participate in the democratic process — but the ever-increasing amount of secret spending in our political process means that voters are more in the dark than ever before on who is spending money to influence their decisions.
A newly reintroduced bill in Congress would significantly improve transparency in our elections: the Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light On Spending in Elections Act (DISCLOSE Act). Campaign Legal Center is calling on Congress to advance this meaningful legislation and ensure all voters have access to important information on who is paying to influence their vote.
Dark Money in Our Federal Elections
In recent years, as corporations and wealthy individuals have spent billions of dollars to influence elections, a substantial amount of that spending has been deliberately hidden from public view using a variety of legally dubious tactics.
The “dark money” — a phrase commonly used to describe secret election spending — that permeates our political system prevents voters from weighing, in the proper context, the credibility and reliability of campaign messages.
Dark money also leaves our elections vulnerable to corruption and foreign influence: When the sources of election spending remain undisclosed, it is hard to prevent foreign money from manipulating our elections or identify election spending that’s part of a corrupt “pay-to-play” bargain.
As our elections have become immersed in dark money, the resulting political atmosphere has become more responsive to wealthy special interest priorities than the needs of everyday Americans.
How Did We Get Here, and How Do We Move Forward?
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC opened the door to this deluge of special interest election spending, eight of the nine then-justices voted to affirm disclosure laws, and the decision predicted a “campaign finance system that pairs corporate independent expenditures with effective disclosure.”
The reality of election spending today is completely at odds with that prediction. During the 2024 election, outside groups spent more than $1.9 billion in dark money on federal races.
For years, Campaign Legal Center (CLC) has been at the forefront of efforts to combat dark money, pursuing enforcement actions as well as legislative and regulatory reforms.
CLC has filed numerous administrative complaints involving “straw donor” schemes in which the true source of election spending funnels money to a super PAC through an intermediary — often a corporate shell entity like an LLC that has no apparent connection to the true contributor — such that the intermediary’s name appears on publicly disclosed campaign finance reports and the true contributor’s identity is obscured.
CLC has also pursued legal action against section 501(c)(4) dark money groups, which often raise and spend millions of dollars to help elect their favored candidates with essentially no transparency.
Yet because individual enforcement actions to combat dark money often stall right out of the gate, Congress needs to enact legislation that significantly expands and bolsters disclosure requirements for election spending. In that vein, reintroducing the DISCLOSE Act is timely and important.
The DISCLOSE Act
The DISCLOSE Act, introduced by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Rep. Chris Pappas, Rep. Jamie Raskin and Rep. Joseph Morelle would dramatically curtail secret spending in our elections by shining the light of public disclosure on dark money.
The DISCLOSE Act would stop the shell game of using intermediary groups to conceal the true sources of large political donations by requiring groups that spend money on elections to disclose donors who have given $10,000 or more during an election cycle.
It also includes trace-back requirements for LLCs and other corporate entities that engage in election spending and requires such entities to provide public disclosures regarding their benefactors, so that the public can know the true source of this political spending.
These reforms would address some of the most commonplace tactics currently used to conceal election spending from public view.
At the same time, these reforms would not prevent anyone from spending as much money as they wish on elections; they only require that such election spending be publicly disclosed — an outcome overwhelmingly supported by the public.
At this tenuous moment for our republic, Congress should pass the DISCLOSE Act to proactively address the rising tide of dark money in our elections, which leaves our democracy less inclusive of — and less responsive to — the voters.
Campaign Legal Center's support for this important legislation is part of our commitment to investigating and exposing wealthy special interests working in the shadows to influence our elections. Support our work today.