Supreme Court declines to take up ‘dark money’ case

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up a challenge to San Francisco's "Sunlight on Dark Money" disclosure law, which would have tested the limits of disclosure and free speech in campaign finance.

San Francisco voters overwhelmingly approved the initiative in 2019, compelling election ads to include a disclaimer naming the top three donors to the group running the ad.

If the donor is another committee, then the committee's top two donors and the dollar amounts given by both need to be disclosed.

The law is "about having a better-informed electorate and making sure that people who are giving big checks in local politics don't do it secretly, but do it publicly," said Jon Golinger, a democracy advocate at Public Citizen who helped draft the San Francisco law.

But plaintiffs called the secondary disclosure requirements overly burdensome and alleged they would "scare away donors," infringing on their constitutional rights.

They were represented by the First Amendment advocates at the Institute for Free Speech, a conservative nonprofit that regularly opposes political spending and contribution restrictions .

The Institute for Free Speech petitioned the Supreme Court in February to consider two questions: whether the disclosure requirement "advances any important or compelling state interest," and if the law "violates the First Amendment freedoms of speech and association."

"San Francisco's secondary donor on-communication disclosure requirement forces the Committee to either give up its protected First Amendment right to speak about a candidate or proclaim the City's message as part of its speech," the original complaint argued.

Both the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit rejected their argument.

"In response to the growing prevalence of money in politics, many governments have required groups that run political advertisements to identify their funding sources publicly," Circuit Court Judge Susan Graber wrote in the opinion.

The disclosure requirement "is substantially related to the governmental interest in informing voters of the source of funding for election-related communications," Graber concluded, and "does not create an excessive burden on Plaintiffs' First Amendment rights relative to that interest."

The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal in a brief, unsigned order.