From The Star

Editorial

Nasty race yields more questions
Sunday, December 12, 2004

The very heated and extremely nasty downstate race for an Illinois Supreme Court seat exposed not just a mean spirit on the part of the candidates, but also an apparent gaping loophole in the state's campaign finance disclosure laws.
While the race for the 5th District seat on the high court was waged at the other end of the state, its ramifications reverberated throughout Illinois as the balance of power on the state's high court was at stake.
In the end Republican Lloyd Karmeier defeated Democrat Gordon Maag in a race that revolved chiefly around the tort reform issue and in which the contestants spent by far the most ever in an Illinois judicial election.
It's easy to guess where the money generally came from: Maag, an opponent of tort reform, had strong support from trial lawyers who have reaped millions in medical malpractice cases in the south and southwest parts of the state, while Karmeier was supported by an array of business interests and political action committees fighting for caps on court awards.
But rearing another ugly head was a tactic supporters of both candidates embraced to hide the specific identities of many campaign contributors.
A St. Louis-area newspaper revealed that two opposing non-profit corporations — both chartered this year — made huge donations to political action committees that had the same names and addresses as the non-profit corporations. The PACs in turn handed over giant contributions to the contesting campaigns.
The law requires that all individual donations of $150 or more be listed, along with the names of who gave what. But because under the same law non-profit corporations do not have to reveal individual donors, the ploy enabled both parties to hide the identities of donors — a clear evasion of the spirit of campaign finance disclosure requirements in Illinois.
If allowed to stand, the tactic will no doubt be employed in numerous future campaigns in the state. The transparency demanded by the current law could possibly cease to exist.
This transparency is about all we have in the way of campaign finance "reform" in Illinois: The Legislature has refused to place caps on the amounts of contributions, has refused to outlaw contributions by labor unions and corporations, has refused to place any limits on contributions by PACs.
We call on the Illinois State Board of Elections to examine what happened in the 5th District and demand that the parties follow not just the letter, but also the spirit of the law by supplying lists of donors to the so-called non-profit corporations.
And the state Legislature should look — without any winking and nodding — at whether the law needs reworking to make certain no such shenanigans are possible again.