Politics is a contact sport, and it would be wrong - and unconstitutional - to silence anyone's political speech.
But the voters should know who is putting up the money to send the message. Often, that information is an important part of the message. In this case, though a political action committee called Truth in Politics complied with the letter of the law, it played hide and seek with the law's intent.
Worse, the A.G.'s office says that it would be difficult to write a more effective disclosure law.
Nevertheless, the Legislature should try. If political operatives can disguise who is behind attack ads or mailers, they threaten the integrity of a campaign finance system that is based on disclosure. One way to dodge the system might be to funnel money through PACs that could not be traced to a known person or group of people.
Utah law requires political action committees to file statements that name who their officers are, who donates money to them and where the committee spends its money. Truth in Politics filed a statement that listed one person, C.L. Peacock, as the organization's sole officer and donor. If the committee amounted to a single person, that is all the law requires.
The committee's initial filing listed a Las Vegas address that belonged to a UPS store and a Park City phone number that disconnected after a few rings.
The state elections director requested an amended filing, which listed the address of a political consultant in Washington, D.C., Debbie Willhite. The Utah Democratic Party chairman at the time, Donald Dunn, had sold the PAC a mailing list, and had worked with Willhite in the past.
It is fair to speculate, then, whether Dunn or the Democratic Party chose to work with or through the PAC to make charges that it did not wish to acknowledge directly. But to this day, the answer to that question is uncertain. And even if there were a direct tie between Democrats and Truth in Politics, it would not be illegal.
In one respect, Utah campaign finance law is wide open. Anyone can give any amount to any candidate. All that is required is disclosure. Now, even that is uncertain.
