SB 1051: Campaign Expenditure Transparency Act

State Sen. Dusty Deevers (R-Elgin) has filed a bill to require "that any organization engaging in independent expenditures in Oklahoma political campaigns must report to the Ethics Commission the name, address, and contact information for its President and Treasurer." He made the following pitch for SB 1051 on Facebook and makes some great points about the real purpose of these anonymous attacks (emphasis added). Here is the bill info page for SB1051 and a direct link to the bill as introduced.

It is time to clean up Oklahoma politics with SB1051, the Campaign Expenditure Transparency Act!

Those of you in Senate District 32 probably remember the cartoonishly absurd dark-money advertising in the 2023 special election. An anonymously sourced organization going by the name "Common Sense Conservatives LLC," about whom we know almost nothing, spent a quarter of a million dollars publishing mailers and TV ads depicting me as a grim reaper, a Chinese dictator, and other nonsensical slander. I know from knocking doors and interacting with voters that people were fed up with the whole election before it even ended; and sadly that is the desired effect of these anonymous liars.

I will let you all in on a trade secret of political campaigns: these sorts of obvious lies are not meant to persuade but meant to demoralize a voter base; to so inundate a district with lies and hyperbole that people check out of the process.

This is bad for Oklahoma politics as a whole. It is bad for each individual voter to be treated in this way. It is bad for those candidates who stick their necks out to run for office out of a genuine desire to serve. It is bad that our election process can be attacked by hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of anonymous lies with no purpose other than to discourage civic engagement.

The anonymity allowed under current law enables mega-wealthy anonymous organizations to bombard our inboxes without voters having any ability to find out who is behind them. When I am assessing a bill before a hearing, I want to know: Who supports this bill and why? Who opposes this bill and why? How is it a voter supposed to determine the validity of a claim on a mailer if they are unable to find out who is making the claim?

Politics, at its best, is about a battle of ideas and debating the issues. Sadly, right now in Oklahoma, politics is largely about destroying reputations. SB1051 could change that by requiring that any organization engaging in independent expenditures in Oklahoma political campaigns must report to the Ethics Commission the name, address, and contact information for its President and Treasurer. People, naturally, will be far less willing to engage in such absurd, shameful, and discrediting behavior if they have to attach their name to it.

This important bill would reform Oklahoma politics to become more idea-driven rather than mudslinging-driven. Everyone should support that.

The bill also requires disclosure of the owner of any post office box used by an independent committee. (It may need to mention private mailboxes explicitly.)

B. It shall be unlawful for any individual or organization to engage in campaign expenditures through the use of a fictitious or unregistered name, or through the establishment of a limited liability company (LLC), corporation, or entity with the primary purpose of concealing its identity. Entities engaging in campaign expenditures through rented post office boxes shall disclose the name and contact information of the renter and all beneficial owners of the entity.

This would be a great start, but we have a great deal of work to do to improve transparency. Independent expenditure committees and political action committees need to be on the same reporting schedule as campaign committees with a pre-election report and continuing disclosure of major contributions and expenditures up to election day. (Currently these committees are only required to file quarterly reports.) All candidates in Oklahoma for any office in any political subdivision should be filing with the Oklahoma Ethics Commission's Guardian system. Citizens should not need to file an Open Records request and show up during school board office hours to view handwritten, illegible, and incorrectly completed disclosures. Everything should be filed digitally and available online 24/7.

The Ethics Commission website needs some improvements, too, such as permanent, sharable URLs to each filed report, the ability to search across all campaigns by donor or by vendor, and the ability to produce whole-campaign reports of contributions and expenditures, rather than having to download each individual report and total them up.

So far the bill has no coauthors and has not been assigned to a committee. Encourage your state legislators to support SB 1051 and to work for these other improvements to campaign transparency.