Ninth Circuit Rejects Challenge to Electioneering Disclosure Requirement

Steven D. Schwinn, John Marshall Law School

The Ninth Circuit ruled yesterday in National Association for Gun Rights, Inc. v. Mangan that Montana's electioneering disclosure requirements did not violate the First Amendment. The ruling keeps the requirements in place.

The Supreme Court has upheld disclosure requirements against First Amendment challenges, and so this ruling is really unremarkable. But at the same time it represents one in the next set of First Amendment challenges to campaign finance laws designed to spur this new Court to strike even more ways that government tries to regulate money in politics.

The case arose when the National Association for Gun Rights sought to spend more than $250 on an "electioneering communication." Montana law requires that any such organization register as a political committee. And such registration, in turn, subjects the group to requirements to disclosure expenditures.

The Association argued that the state's definition of electioneering communication was facially overbroad and unconstitutional as applied to it. In particular, the Association said that the First Amendment permits states to require disclosure only of express advocacy for or against a specific candidate, not the kind of general information that it sought to distribute.

The Ninth Circuit rejected the challenge. The court said that disclosure requirements are valid, even as to non-express-advocacy communications, because, under "exacting scrutiny," they are designed to promote the state's interests in transparency and discouraging circumvention of its electioneering laws.