(CN) — A voter-backed measure to enforce election campaign-finance disclosures in Alaska prevailed Friday after a ruling from the Ninth Circuit affirmed a federal judge’s denial in 2022 of a preliminary injunction that would have blocked the law.
“We hold that the district court acted within its discretion to conclude that plaintiffs were unlikely to succeed on the merits of their First Amendment claims,” Chief Judge Mary H. Murguia, an Obama appointee, wrote in her opinion. “Accordingly, the district court’s order denying plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction is affirmed.”
The appeal — brought before the Ninth Circuit on Feb. 9, 2024, in Portland, Oregon — stemmed from a 2022 lawsuit filed by political donors. Those donors claimed that a 2020 voter initiative enforced burdensome disclosure rules that could lead to retaliation for their open support.
The law, Ballot Measure 2, also restructured Alaska’s election system to have open primaries and ranked-choice voting in general elections. The measure amended Alaska’s campaign finance laws to address “dark money” in elections, including contributions from undisclosed parties and third-party groups. The law required clear ad disclosures and the immediate reporting of donors who contribute over $2,000 annually to a specific candidate or an organization that makes independent expenditures in elections.
“Donor plaintiffs fear that publicity listing their support of their preferred causes as required by Ballot Measure 2 may lead to reprisals against them and their business interests in the current climate of cancel culture,” donors wrote in their complaint.
The donors fearing retaliation include five Alaska residents and two independent expenditure groups, Families of the Last Frontier and Alaska Free Market Coalition. The groups historically support Republican candidates. One of the resident plaintiffs, Trevor Shaw, is the chair of the Alaska Free Market Coalition.
U.S. District Judge Sharon L. Gleason, an Obama appointee, in July 2022 denied the plaintiffs’ motion to enjoin the law’s disclosure rules for the 2022 election. In her order, she wrote the donors were unlikely to succeed in arguing that the measure’s provisions violated their First Amendment rights.
On Friday, the donors were similarly unsuccessful with their appeal after Murguia and U.S. Circuit Judge Jennifer Sung, a Biden appointee, disagreed with their arguments that the reporting requirement is duplicative with existing criminal law, overly burdensome and not narrowly tailored to the government’s informational interests.
Murguia wrote that the individual-donor contribution reporting requirement worked in concert with disclosures to the Alaska Public Offices Commission, "helping to ensure that the information received by voters is reliable and accurate."
“Prompt disclosure by both sides of a transaction ensures that the electorate receives the most helpful information in the lead up to an election,” Murguia added.
The chief judge also said the plaintiffs had failed to prove how requiring donors to report their contributions within 24 hours was overly burdensome or otherwise unconstitutional.
“As the district court found, Ballot Measure 2’s reporting mechanism is relatively simple and ‘straightforward,’” Murguia wrote. “Contributors who hit the $2,000 threshold must fill out a short online form that asks for the amount of the triggering contribution, the aggregate total amount of their contributions, the name of the recipient independent expenditure organization, and, if the donor is not the true source of the funds, the true source’s identity and the identities of any intermediaries."
"The process is even easier when the donor is the true source of the funds — as plaintiffs claim they ‘always’ are for their donations," she added.
Similarly, Murguia rejected the plaintiffs’ arguments that disclaimers took up too much space in advertisements and that the requirement was not narrowly tailored because it forced donors to include information that was already available online.
"We rejected the plaintiffs’ claim that the disclaimer requirement was insufficiently tailored," Murguia wrote. "The plaintiffs did not challenge the disclosure of the information — only its presence on the disclaimer — and failed to show that one could be permissible but the other not.”
Rounding out the panel, U.S. Circuit Judge Danielle Forrest, a Trump appointee, both concurred and dissented. Agreeing with the suing donors, she argued they were likely to succeed in showing that the requirement of duplicative individual-donor contribution reporting was burdensome and disproportionate to the interests it serves.
“The individual-donor reporting requirement imposes several burdens on donors,” Forrest wrote. She argued the law used specialized and unfamiliar legal terms and references that some citizens may not understand but that citizens risked severe fines if they violated the rules.
Forrest noted that the requirement forces donors to predict whether the entities they are donating to require a disclosure report. The assumption that donors can easily find that information online overlooks the time it could take for them to contact organizations or even acquire access to the internet in such a remote state, she added.
"Unlike knowledge of the law, internet access is not a requirement of citizenship," Forrest wrote. "Nor is it a given that all donors will have internet access.”
Moreover, Forrest argued that it is reasonable to expect that the reporting requirement “risks chilling individual donors from fully participating in political expression” if donors are concerned about the ramifications of their donations.
“For all these reasons, I would reverse as to Plaintiffs’ challenge to the individual donor reporting requirement," she wrote.
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