Prop. 211 is a long-awaited triumph for state voters

After six years of trying, Arizona voters this year finally got the chance to decide whether we should get to know who is secretly spending big money to buy our elections.

It wasn’t even close:

Sunshine 1, Fat cats and the politicians who do their bidding: 0.

A rock solid 73% of voters approved Proposition 211, the Voters’ Right to Know Act.

It passed in early balloting. It passed with Election Day voters. It passed in every county in Arizona.

It seems the only people who want to keep us in the dark are Gov. Doug Ducey, the Arizona Legislature and the “dark money” groups that for years have blocked dark money disclosure initiatives from ever reaching the ballot.

Gee, I wonder why.

For a decade, state leaders have stood by and allowed dark money to run like a river through Arizona, proclaiming that fat cats have a First Amendment right to secretly fund political campaigns. In fact, Ducey and the Legislature passed laws to open the floodgates wider, allowing even more anonymous money to flow forth in an effort to persuade us to vote a certain way.

The only way Arizonans were ever going to see who’s pulling the political levers was if they demanded it. But first, citizens would have to win the right to put the question to voters, a struggle that would last six years.

In 2016, the people funding the citizen initiative suddenly (read: suspiciously) pulled out.

In 2018, hundreds of thousands of Arizona voters signed petitions, only to watch as the Arizona Supreme Court tossed the Outlaw Dirty Money initiative off the ballot.

This, after a trio of dark money groups sued — with a little help from new laws passed by the Arizona Legislature to make it harder to get citizen initiatives on the ballot.

In 2020, Outlaw Dirty Money was back and on track until COVID-19 came along and derailed it.

This year, 400,000 voters signed petitions to put the Voters’ Right to Know Act on the ballot.

Predictably, the power set was not pleased. The Goldwater Institute along with a trio of dark money groups – the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, Americans for Prosperity and the Center for Arizona Policy Action – sued to try to knock it off the ballot.

Fortunately, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Joseph Mikitish wasn’t buying any of their phony baloney arguments for why voters shouldn’t get the chance to see behind the curtain. Neither was the Arizona

Supreme Court.

Proposition 211 is a new and improved proposal that ensures the deep pockets funding political campaigns are identified and thus accountable for the claims they make in the attack ads that have become standard operating procedure for every dark money campaign.

It will require any nonprofit or political party spending $50,000 or more on any combination of statewide races to disclose all donors who contributed more than $5,000 to a campaign, regardless of whether the money was passed through intermediary groups. For local races, the threshold would be $25,000.

The disclosures would have to come within five days of the money being spent, so no more waiting around until after the election to find out who was trying to sway your vote.

Sadly, it won’t affect federal spending. For that, we’d need to elect federal officials who believe in sunshine.

But it’s a long-awaited win for Terry Goddard and his grassroots group of volunteers who worked for 14 months on this campaign to get secret money out of democracy.

More importantly, it’s a win for voters.

Of course, the fight isn’t over. Expect the dark money crowd to run to the U.S. Supreme Court, claiming that fat cats

Expect the dark money crowd to run to the U.S. Supreme Court, claiming that fat cats have a constitutional right to secretly spend whatever it takes to get their candidates elected.

have a constitutional right to secretly spend whatever it takes to get their candidates elected.

To gain instant access to hallways of power when the rest of us can’t even get a returned phone call.

As for Goddard, this long-awaited win was sweet.

“I want to make Arizona politics accountable as to who is actually funding the messages our voters are hearing and let voters make the decision whether those messages are credible or not,” he told me in May 2021, when he launched the petition drive to put Proposition 211 on the ballot.

“Ultimately, it comes back to voters. They have to have a full set of the facts in order to make a good decision, a solid decision, and right now, because of the prevalence of dark money, especially in Arizona, they don’t have that luxury.”

This year, 3 in 4 voters finally got the chance to agree with him.