Why The English Only Amendment Failed According To Eric Crafton

By Kleinheider Posted on February 10, 2009 at 10:30 am

The councilman’s self-described “inside the beltway”(!?) opinion:

[T]he opposition’s apparent ignoring of campaign finance law by advocating for the defeat of both charter amendments, while organized as a single-issue committee instead of as a political-action committee, as required by law, was the final nail in the coffin. Why was this harmful? As a single-issue committee, they could accept unlimited corporate campaign contributions, which they did. As a PAC, which is the required entity to advocate for two or more issues, they couldn’t have accepted any money from corporations. It appears more than half of the $300,000 raised by the opponents of the English amendment came from corporations. Oops! That means they would have had only around $125,000 to spend on the election vs. our $51,000. I guess those pesky PAC rules would have been inconvenient, wouldn’t they? In my opinion, taken together, these three strategies ensured the official English amendment’s failure.

UPDATE: Intrepid Metro City Paper reporter Nate Rau informs me that The opposition did go to the trouble of filing two separate single issue committees to oppose each charter amendment on the ballot..

See reports for the committee opposing the first charter amendment here and the second here.

Now, clearly, one committee was used more prominently than the other but there were no flagrant campaign shenanigans at play here such as, for instance, deliberately failing to file financial disclosures at all until after the election.

permalink | 4 Comments

Tags: English-Only, Eric Crafton, financial disclosures