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

Same idea surfaces in Colorado

Something similar to the South Dakota and Alaska measures surfaced this year in Colorado, too, and the same questions surround it. The Rocky Mountain News called it a "proposal to bar no-bid government contractors from contributing to political candidates," which is the core of both Alaska's "Anti-Corruption Act" and South Dakota's Initiated Measure 10.

The group proposing it is called Clean Government Colorado, which sounds a lot like South Dakotans for Open and Clean Government -- and like South Carolinians for Responsible Government, for that matter. Clean Government Colorado is run by Tom Lucero, "a University of Colorado regent."

But the Rocky Mountain News found another part of the measure:

The proposed constitutional amendment would ban those contractors or any organization with exclusive collecting bargaining rights - namely, labor unions - from giving political contributions for two years after expiration of the contract.

Any company that violated the rule would lose access to no-bid contracts for three years, and any official taking such a donation could be removed from office.

"Until you change the culture of how government does business, there's this automatic distrust with the citizens," said Lucero, a Republican. "The Clean Government Amendment is specially engineered toward addressing the idea of 'pay to play.' "

The proposed amendment would continue two recent trends in ballot initiatives: Making government more transparent and changing state law in a way that irks union leaders.
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Jess Knox, executive director of Protect Colorado's Future, said the measure would not shut down corporate contributions but would eliminate a valuable way that union members have to communicate during elections.

Plan would bar some contractor donations
Rocky Mountain News (CO) - July 31, 2008

So the Colorado measure has a strong anti-labor union component, but it would allow corporate contributors to continue doing business as usual.