More donor disclosure is always in the public interest

RECENTLY IN CommonWealth Beacon , Jim Stergios of Pioneer Institute and Paul Craney of the Fiscal Alliance Foundation took issue with the Office of Campaign and Political Finance over disclosure of donors in ballot campaigns. They wrote, “This isn’t about whether donor disclosure has a role in elections; it’s about whether the government can expand those rules through vague interpretations.” This issue, in fact, is entirely about donor disclosure in elections.

Stergios and Craney couched their argument on the narrow grounds of OCPF’s “new interpretation” of a specific law governing donor disclosure requirements for spending within 90 days of the general election. I did not think the “new interpretation” case was clear, so I emailed OCPF about it. The office replied, “we’re not aware of a ‘new interpretation.’”

This disagreement leaves us with a more vital question: Should the Office of Campaign and Political Finance be enforcing the law to require entities spending money on “communications purchased to influence or affect the vote on a question submitted to the voters” within 90 days of the general election to disclose their donors? The answer to that question is a resounding yes.

Richard Hasen, a leading scholar of campaign finance, reminds us in Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections that the Supreme Court enabled unlimited spending on ballot questions in in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978). The Bellotti decision served as a precursor to Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, which opened the floodgates of “independent expenditures” in candidate elections.

The result, Prof. Hasen writes , has been that “the collapse of campaign finance regulation in the United States has facilitated a path toward oligarchic power redistribution.” The very least we should expect is that the oligarchic powers be identified to the voters.

That is what the Citizens United majority expected, and what Justice Antonin Scalia envisioned. As he wrote in a concurrence in Doe v. Reed a few months after Citizens United :

Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed. For my part, I do not look forward to a society which, thanks to the Supreme Court, campaigns anonymously … and even exercises the direct democracy of initiative and referendum hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism. This does not resemble the Home of the Brave.

Wealthy donors such as the ones being hidden by Fiscal Alliance Foundation have been fleeing the Home of the Brave ever since.

The term “nonprofit” repeated by Stergios and Craney has no magical properties. It simply identifies the sections of the Internal Revenue Service code under which these entities are organized. In practice Pioneer Institute and Fiscal Alliance Foundation serve as conservative advocacy groups.

Fiscal Alliance Foundation and Pioneer Institute are both affiliates of the State Policy Network (SPN), a coordinating hub of state-level right-wing policy shops. Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance is an SPN partner . Prof. Elena Aydarova and her colleagues place SPN at the center of “the Conservative Industrial Complex’s war on education.” Prof. Alex Hertel-Fernandez finds SPN part of an effective 50-state “right-wing troika” with the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity. (The late David Koch contributed a million dollars to Pioneer.) The left-leaning Center for Media and Democracy and right-leaning Influencewatch agree: SPN is a conservative policy advocacy operation.

Fiscal Alliance Foundation and Pioneer are organized under IRS section 501(c)(3). Such organizations are tax-exempt and tax-deductible to donors. A 501(c)(3) cannot donate to candidates but may donate to ballot committees.

Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance is a 501(c)(4) . It is tax-exempt but not tax-deductible to the donor. As a “social welfare” organization it can donate money directly to a ballot committee and make independent expenditures supporting a candidate. Another Fiscal Alliance Foundation-related entity is Fiscal Partners, organized as a business association under section 501(c)(6), which is tax-exempt but not deductible to the donor. As The Boston Globe explained in 2019, Fiscal Partners exists to take in money and pass the cash to Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance without revealing donors’ identities.

Fiscal Partners has done its job well. From 2017-2024 , the last year for which records are publicly available, Fiscal Partners sent $1,756,000 to Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance and $50,000 to Fiscal Alliance Foundation. The true sources of those funds remain dark.

The most recently available IRS Form 990 tax returns from 2024 show all three “Fiscal” organizations at the same address. Craney is listed as principal officer of Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance and Fiscal Partners. Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance’s current webpage lists Craney as executive director. Fiscal Alliance Foundation’s current webpage lists him as executive director and a board member. The secretary of state’s Corporations Division lists Craney as president of Fiscal Partners. Fiscal Alliance Foundation and Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance explicitly promise to protect their donors’ names from disclosure.

It is ironic that Stergios and Craney specified August 3 as the dread date when donors would face disclosure. August 3 is the tenth anniversary of OCPF’s determination that the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance should disclose the identity of a dark money donor in two legislative special elections held that year. The organization has ignored that finding and never disclosed the donor.

Stergios and Craney argue that their polls and studies are merely efforts to “educate” the public. In 2019 CommonWealth Beacon fact-checked a Fiscal Alliance Foundation poll that was “worded in a way that seemed designed to influence the response.”

In 2018, Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance founder Rick Green was running for Congress as a Republican. The Alliance issued a report showing what it claimed were irregular voter registrations in four municipalities in Green’s district. Each of the localities had large Latino populations. Heavily Democratic Lawrence, 74 percent Latino, was singled out by Mass Fiscal. The secretary of state rightly ignored the study.

It seems plain that Pioneer and Fiscal Alliance run “communications purchased to influence or affect the vote.” They are not arguing that they do not, just that they think the obvious interpretation of the statute caught them by surprise.

Avoiding the substance make sense since Americans overwhelming favor disclosure. A 2025 YouGov poll for the non-partisan group Issue One asked Americans whether they would support a ballot question in their own state to eliminate corporate money, anonymous donors, and dark money spending in elections. After being informed of arguments for and against such a measure, including the “free speech” argument offered by Stergios and Craney, 72 percent of Americans said they would support such a ballot question, with only 12 percent opposed. Republicans, Democrats, and Independents all favor disclosure of dark money donors.

A June 2014 Suffolk University poll asked Massachusetts likely voters if they support stricter regulations of super PACs, including “making them disclose the names of their donors?” Disclosure was supported by 67 percent with 13 percent opposed and 20 percent undecided. In 2018 by 71 percent to 29 percent Massachusetts voters supported the creation of a commission to study a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United . Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance was opposed.

The Brennan Center for Justice’s Secret Spending in the States details how dark money affects elections. Unidentified funders often hold direct economic interests in election outcomes, especially in ballot questions.

Dark money spending can dominate local elections (such as the local measure used as an example in Stergios and Craney’s commentary). And dark money may mislead voters, malign or intimidate candidates, or even discourage good people from running at all.

In 1825, the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote , “In the darkness of secrecy, sinister interest and evil in every shape, have full swing. … Where there is no publicity there is no justice.”

The American campaign finance system provides a perfect example. We deserve to know who is spending vast sums of money to choose our candidates and overwhelm our ballot questions. The Office of Campaign and Political Finance’s interpretation of the statutory language is correct. The public would be well-served to see it aggressively enforced.

Maurice Cunningham is a retired professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Boston and author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization . His Substack is Sinister Interest & Evil in Every Shape: A Dark Money Reader .