— The Birmingham News, on Alabama’s campaign financing:
No one makes a better case these days for cleaning up Alabama’s campaign financing cesspool than Paul Hubbert. Not by his words — although he has, on occasion, expressed sentiment for better disclosure on campaign contributions — but by his actions.
Hubbert and his Alabama Education Association played a starring role in ensuring that Bradley Byrne was not the Republican Party’s gubernatorial candidate and, in the process, demonstrated two huge changes needed in Alabama’s campaign-finance law:
• Ban money transfers among political action committees. Hubbert, the Democratic Party vice president (he resigned that position immediately after the primary runoff), bankrolled the True Republican PAC’s $1.4 million attack ad campaign against Byrne. The AEA’s PAC funneled almost all the money through other PACs, which gave the money to True Republican PAC. That money-laundering process hides from the public the original source of a campaign contribution. ...
• Force so-called “527” groups to disclose who they are and who is funding them. The shadowy Conservative Coalition of Alabama, by Byrne’s estimation, spent more than $500,000 in ads attacking him. Byrne asked for an attorney general’s investigation because the group didn’t file organization or disclosure forms with the secretary of state’s office, as the law requires PACs to do. ... That allowed it to avoid scrutiny while running “informational” ads that attack or praise a candidate’s record. ...
There are other gaps in the state’s campaign-finance law. Candidates should have to file disclosure reports electronically, and they should have to file instantly. As it is now, candidates submit paper reports, which the secretary of state’s office scans and posts online. They have to submit reports of the money they’ve collected by 45 days before an election, and again by five days before an election. Voters won’t know until after the election how much money candidates collected between the five-day deadline and election day.
Also, voters need a searchable database at the secretary of state’s website that would allow them to find out which interest groups, individuals and PACs are contributing to candidates. ...
We’re not so naive to believe the Legislature will do anything about the problems anytime soon, because no one benefits more from the current system than incumbents. Maybe if Hubbert and the AEA pushed as hard for campaign-finance reform in the Legislature as they did to defeat Byrne in the Republican gubernatorial primary, we’d get a stronger law.
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