Robert Frommer
Institute for Justice
8/9/2010
It was inevitable: Politicians are starting to turn to the campaign finance laws to silence their critics on the Internet.
In Ohio, for instance, Edmund Corsi runs GeaugaConstitutionalCouncil.org, a blog that praises and criticizes various local officials. Well, it turns out that some of those officials don’t like getting criticized. Rather than responding with their own speech, however, those pols got the Geauga Board of Elections to file a complaint with the Ohio Election Commission. They said that Corsi violated Ohio’s campaign finance laws because he failed to register, appoint a treasurer and file regular financial reports with the state before daring to speak.
After some legal wrangling, the Commission now reads the complaint to say that Corsi violated the law by not disclosing his name and home address on the website. But, as the Institute for Justice has repeatedly pointed out, mandatory disclosure laws cause far too many people to remain silent. Thankfully, an Ohio-based public interest law firm has come to Corsi’s defense and asked for these charges to be dismissed.
If campaign finance “reformers” hate anything, it’s the idea that someone somewhere might be speaking freely about politics. As IJ’s Congress Shall Make No Law blog reported last week, the California Fair Political Practices Commission is talking not about whether to regulate candidates’ Facebook posts and tweets, but how. And Corsi’s case shows that would-be censors are now eyeing the Internet as their next battleground. Why? Well, blogs, Twitter and other social media let everyone make their voices heard. To the political insiders who are used to monopolizing speech, that’s a scary thing.
To the rest of us, though, that’s freedom.
