Make disclosure mean just that



Welcome, New York, to the new, and woefully unregulated, era of high-priced elections over, yes, school budgets. Albany got its own taste of such sharp-elbowed politics last month, when slick, misleading — and anonymous — mailings went out across the city urging voters to reject the school budget.

Oh, there was suspicion from the start that the same people associated with the Brighter Choice Foundation and the 11 charter schools it supports in Albany were behind a well-financed and secretive campaign to limit the funding for traditional public schools. It wasn’t until after votes were cast in the school budget election, however, that such a critical connection was laid out. Only then did the public know just who was telling them that their taxes were so high.

Times are changing, and drastically so. Just imagine a year or two from now, when New York is likely to have a tax cap. Think of the fierce and, yes, expensive campaigns when school budgets that include increasing the tax levy more than 2 percent go before voters so the tax cap can be overridden, as long as 60 percent of them approve.

Shouldn’t people know who’s paying for these campaigns, just as they do anytime someone spends more than $1,000 advocating one way or another in other elections?

Under legislation being pushed by Assemblyman Sam Hoyt, D-Buffalo, and Sen. Kenneth Lavalle, R-Suffolk County, state election law would be expanded to require similar disclosure by people spending that much money to influence school budget elections.

When charter school advocates, for example, likely spent more than $10,000 trying to defeat the Albany school budget, they were taking advantage of the deficiencies in the state’s elections laws. In no other election would such an underground campaign be legal. Had they been campaigning for, or against, certain city school board candidates, spending that much money would have required them to identify themselves.

The Hoyt-LaValle bill would give jurisdiction over school budget vote expenditures to the state Board of Elections, where it should be, rather than the Education Department. It still would permit small donors to very quietly take part in contentious school budget campaigns with modest contributions. But it also would expose the high rollers to the appropriate scrutiny.

The distinction is one more instance where the law makes a difference between constitutionally protected free speech and sensibly regulated political expenditures. No one’s right to weigh in on a school budget vote — even anonymously, a right the Supreme Court upheld in the 1995 case of McIntyre vs. Ohio Elections Commission — is threatened by what Mr. Hoyt and Mr. LaValle are trying to do. That protection of anonymity doesn’t extend to larger expenditures in other election campaigns; it shouldn’t exist in school budget elections, either.

“We’re trying to close a loophole here,” says Mr. Hoyt. “We’re trying to make school budget campaigns consistent with the rest of the election laws.”

Doing so would be entirely consistent with the public’s right to know. That means, in this case, who is paying for ads and other expenses in what are supposed to be seemingly innocent political campaigns — and why.

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