Sunlight Foundation

WASHINGTON, DC – This morning, the Sunlight Foundation released seven proposals that should be immediately implemented in order to create a more transparent, accountable political disclosure system in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) decision last week. The proposals are structured to address new realities, including the ability for corporations and labor unions to spend unlimited amounts of money on independent expenditure campaigns, on behalf of candidates and issues.

“We need to act right now to make sure that there are proper disclosure regulations on the books so that elected officials, corporations and labor unions can be held accountable to the American people, and significant criminal and civil penalties for anyone who tries to circumvent those regulations,” said Ellen Miller, executive director and co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation.

The seven proposals would require corporations to report all expenditures of corporate funds on political activities to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) within 24 hours of cutting the check. It would likewise require labor unions to similarly disclose their political expenditures to the Department of Labor. New disclaimers are called for on all independent expenditure campaigns. These disclaimers must state the name of the corporation that paid for the ad, as well as their approval of the message. Due to the large influx of money expected to flood the campaign world, Sunlight is also calling for monthly, instead of quarterly, campaign finance reports for candidates, PACs and parties. Those reports should be required to be filed electronically.

The entire campaign finance system must move to an online, searchable, sortable, downloadable and machine-readable format so any American who wants to research campaign contribution disclosures will be able to in a meaningful way. Furthermore, all of the reported data should be disclosed in real time in a common format standard that is open and non-proprietary.

Finally, the Justice Department, the FEC and the SEC must be given the power to target anyone who breaks or disregards these new disclosure rules. To fund these enforcement mechanisms, filing feels for corporations making independent expenditures must be imposed on a sliding scale—the more an entity spends on political ads, the more it will have to pay to fund enforcement mechanism.

“The Supreme Court stated in last week’s landmark case that they believe that the Internet is a powerful tool to give Americans the information they need to hold their elected officials, corporations and labor unions accountable,” said Ellen Miller. “We need to act swiftly to make sure that the appropriate regulations and penalties are in place, before this new system has a chance to spiral completely out of control.”

The Sunlight Foundation is a non-partisan, non-profit that uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable. Visit SunlightFoundation.com to learn more about Sunlight’s projects, including Transparency Corps and Party Time.