Honest Elections Oregon, an advocacy group that focuses on limiting political contributions for both individuals and political parties, has had a few bumps in the path of their most recent ballot initiatives.
The ballot initiatives, IP-43, 44, and 45, aim to recreate Honest Elections’ previous win on a statewide level. The group’s most recent win included limits to contributions in Multnomah County and Portland.
Secretary of State Shemia Fagan, however, seems to be purposefully raising hurdles for the movement, according to Willamette Weekly’s coverage.The bill in question would cap contributions for political candidates to $2,000 for individuals and to $50,000 for political parties, among other limits.
This month, Fagan’s chief legal counsel, P.K. Runkles-Pearson, wrote to Honest Elections organizers Jason Kafoury and Dan Meek, informing them of Fagan’s plan to reject the language of the bill due to a legal hiccup – it doesn’t include the full text of the Oregon laws that would be up for change.
While Kafoury says Fagan’s decision is entirely unsupported in terms of both precedent and practice, Fagan’s spokesman Ben Morris says that the law is rather clear on the need to include the full text of any potentially changed laws.
“This is a pretty cut-and-dried situation,” he told Willamette Weekly’s Alex Wittwer. “They just need to fix a technical error in a filing. We’ve applied this standard consistently.”
Though Kafoury seems less than confident in that claim, saying, “This is a death knell for us.”
In order to remedy the situation, Honest Elections Oregon would need to:
- Gather 112,020 signatures by July 8
- Collect 1,000 “sponsorship signatures”
- Get the sponsorship signatures certified
- Acquire a new ballot title from the Oregon attorney general
- Get comments on the new title
These requirements, according to Kafoury, are not realistically achievable in the given timeline.
Among the other things this bill would impact is unions’ ability to invest in political candidates, keeping their maximum investment to $10,000 per legislative race and $20,000 per statewide race.
This would seem to be a problem for Fagan, who received $50,000 in 2020 for her current position from the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. Fagan was also the top recipient of union contributions during the campaign, winning endorsements from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and the Oregon AFL-CIO. She raised over $3 million for the race, a majority of which came directly from unions.
Kafoury told Willamette Weekly, “This is a very typical delay tactic for people who don’t want things on the ballot… They file ballot title challenges, and then they file an appeal to the state Supreme Court, and it takes a couple of months for the courts to rule.”
And this isn’t Fagan’s first kerfuffle with Honest Elections Oregon in terms of election matters. On Jan. 6, Fagan ruled that former New York Times columnist and Yamhill, Or. native Nicholas Kristof did not meet the state’s three-year residency requirement to run for governor.
Kafoury said, “It smells like selective enforcement to me, and it reeks of political cronyism.”
By Ethan Hauck
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