Anonymous money floods Colorado too

It's a system: An anonymous donor supplies funding to a non-profit organization, which then supplies funding to a campaign committee, which then promotes a ballot measure that, in some way, meets the needs of the original anonymous donor.

Why does the donor remain anonymous? It's anybody's guess.

Why does the donor contribute to a non-profit organization instead of directly to a campaign committee? Because non-profit organizations don't have to reveal their donors, while campaign committees are required to report that information.

It's a system, and the Colorado Independent found $2.4 million flowing through one in Colorado.

Nonprofits are traditionally “social welfare” organizations that register with the federal Internal Revenue Service, but recently they have been used in Colorado to fund political causes, all while keeping secret the names of donors who have paid for campaign costs or for petition efforts to put a proposal on the ballot.

Morgan Carroll, an Aurora Democrat who is running against Republican Suzanne Andrews in Senate District 29, said she wants to bring further transparency to nonprofit electioneering, possibly by supporting legislation in 2009 that would require certain nonprofit groups to disclose funders or by using state audits to examine the organizations’ political activities.
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“To the extent people really are electioneering and using the [nonprofit] status as a way to avoid disclosures I think we need to address that assuming we can find a clean constitutional way to do it,” Carroll says.

The majority of initiative campaigns this year have not funded their efforts exclusively with anonymous nonprofit funds, according to state campaign-finance records. For instance, Colorado For Equal Rights, a campaign supporting a ballot question to define a fertilized human egg as a person, has disclosed dozens of individual names. Protect Colorado’s Future, another group opposing Amendments 47 and 49, has released records showing that a large majority of the campaign’s funding comes from various labor unions.

In contrast, the Amendment 49 campaign, being supported by the Golden-based Independence Institute conservative think tank, has collected nearly 100 percent of its funding through a nonprofit organization called Colorado At Its Best, receiving more than $1.4 million dollars since February, records show.

Anonymous dough flows into Colorado initiative campaigns