Higher Corporate Spending on Election Ads Could Be All but Invisible

by Chisun Lee,
ProPublica - March 10, 2010

Sen. Charles Schumer and Rep. Chris Van Hollen plan to introduce a bill aimed at offsetting the recent Supreme Court ruling that allows corporations and unions to use their general funds to run television ads that say outright whether a candidate should be elected.

The Supreme Court recently freed [1] corporations to spend more money on aggressive election ads. But if businesses take advantage of this new freedom, the public probably won't know it, because it's easy for them to legally hide their political spending.

Under current disclosure laws for federal elections, it's virtually impossible for the public to track how much a business spends, what it's spending on, or who ultimately benefits. Experts say the transparency problem extends to state and local races as well.

"There is no good way to gauge" how much any given company spends on elections, said Karl Sandstrom, a former vice chairman of the Federal Election Commission and counsel to the Center for Political Accountability. "There's no central collection of the information, no monitoring."

(More here.)