Of Cash and Campaigns: Criticized as Confusing and Antiquated, Kentucky's Law Governing Election Financing is Being Rebuilt

Kentucky's election finance laws get little love.

Various courts and legislators have chucked some of them out the window. Candidates curse them as overbearing, hard to follow and unnecessarily punitive. Voters find the system confusing and not very revealing. And recent changes in federal laws have spotlighted inconsistencies between the two.

Attacked, amended and reorganized on a piecemeal basis over the last couple of decades, the system by which the state regulates and exposes the effect of money on state and local political races is about to get an overhaul.

A 21-member task force commissioned by the Kentucky Registry of Election Finance has spent the last eight months studying the system top to bottom and has come up with 88 specific recommendations on how to improve it.

The proposals run the gamut, says Secretary of State Trey Grayson, a member of the task force. "There's some of the higher-level, public policy, sexy, headline-grabbing (proposals), but also a lot of technical changes and fixes the Registry had to deal with on a daily basis,'' he said.

For example, some of the bigger proposals include allowing gubernatorial candidates to choose their running mates after the primary instead of before; requiring candidates who spend more than $25,000 to file electronic reports; increasing the amount an individual can give a candidate from $1,000 to the federal limit of about $2,100, with further increases built in; increasing the minimum amount a candidate has to spend before he or she is required to file a report to $5,000; allowing contributions to be made on-line; and allowing candidates up to 180 days to raise contributions to pay back money they loaned to their campaigns.

The majority of the proposals would need legislative approval to take effect. The report was approved by the Registry on Sept. 19 and will be presented to the legislature's Interim Joint Committee on Elections, Constitutional Amendments and Intergovernmental Affairs on Nov. 15.

Sen. Damon Thayer, R-Georgetown, the co-chairman of the committee, said he finds a lot to like in the report and said he's considering sponsoring it as an omnibus reform bill when the General Assembly meets in January.

"Anything that adds disclosure and transparency to campaign finance is something worth looking at,'' Thayer said. "I think we can tackle this issue this session. We have time, and I certainly have the inclination.''

Thayer said he especially supports raising the minimum threshold for reporting to $5,000, saying it will increase the number of local candidates, and said he likes the electronic filing requirement and the additional 60-day pre-election report. He's less enthralled with the reintroduction of exploratory committees, since a bill he sponsored in the 2005 session killed them off.

Other critics also have problems with specific proposals, although they like the overall report. The 88 proposals were voted on individually by the task force; members also had a chance to add "dissenting opinions'' to the final draft, and in fact a few of those dissents led to changes in the final report.

Attorney General Greg Stumbo, whose office had a representative on the task force, said allowing gubernatorial candidates to pick their running mates after the primary may be unconstitutional.

Stumbo also doesn't like the idea of doubling the contribution limit; wants so-called 527 organizations to be regulated (he calls them "sham'' PACs); wants caps on the amount of money a candidate can loan his or her campaign with the expectation of repayment; and wants the task force to revisit the idea of public financing of elections.

"We must all pull together in keeping our elections honest and our officials accountable,'' Stumbo said in a release.

Richard Beliles, a task force member who leads the Kentucky chapter of Common Cause, said he also would like to see public financing for gubernatorial campaigns and limits on campaign loans.

Glasgow attorney John Rogers, who co-chaired the task force and is chairman of the Registry, said the task force sought to make it easier for the public to track who is donating money to candidates and to make the laws less onerous and easier to understand and follow. That way the new system would encourage people to participate in the process, whether as candidates or as contributors.

There's "more opportunity for folks to participate individually,'' Rogers said. "It gives them more power in the system.''

Sarah M. Jackson, executive director of the Registry, said the report is noteworthy for its broad mission. The task force sought to bring Kentucky's laws more in line with laws governing federal elections, to make campaign finance data available more quickly to the public, to streamline rules and to make the system more "transparent.''

"The easier we can make the laws to follow, the less likely candidates are to get caught up in the intricacies of the law or get caught up in the loopholes, and the more people will be encouraged to participate in the process,'' she said.

The cumulative effect of the changes, Grayson said, is simply to "build more trust in the system.''