Personhood Colorado’s predecessor, Colorado for Equal Rights, amended half of its 13 total reports filed during the active campaign season to account for omitted donations and expenditures. The 2008 group led by Kristi Burton, a then-19-year-old law student who launched the first-in-the-nation ballot measure, was levied a small fine for campaign finance violations for skirting the rules after a Colorado blogger lodged a formal complaint.
In addition to the reporting snafus, the parallels between the two groups are remarkably similar. Both were founded in June — Burton’s campaign launched in 2007 and Garcia Jones teamed up with Hanks in 2009. And while both got off to a slow fundraising start, Burton raised $2,400, or four times more than Garcia Jones by the end of third quarter reporting period.
Garcia Jones, a former legal adviser to the anti-abortion fundraising powerhouse American Life League, was recruited to the renewed Colorado effort by Hanks and anti-abortion activists Keith Mason and Cal Zastrow.
Mason, from Wichita, Kan., and Michigan resident Zastrow moved to Colorado to work on the 2008 campaign with Burton. Following a 73-27 electoral drubbing at the polls, the duo founded Personhood USA in June 2009 to launch multiple state efforts to pass constitutional amendments in 2010. Burton is not officially involved with the renewed effort but has been feted by American Life League as a rising star in the movement.
The new suburban Denver-based national group is organized as a 501c4, an advocacy-oriented federal tax-exempt nonprofit organization, and is not required to report its financial backing until January 2011 — months after the election. A loophole in Colorado law does not require this particular strain of political nonprofit to report its activities to state compliance officials. When state legislators cracked down in 2007 on campaign abuses by IRS-designated 527 nonprofit organizations that ranged from allegations of money laundering to deceptive advertising, political activists flocked to the less monitored c4 organizations.
And it’s this uncoordinated nature of federal and state campaign reporting rules that creates fertile territory for shadowy activities and less than timely accounting to the public.
Luis Toro, senior counsel for Colorado Ethics Watch, explained that state campaign finance rules on expenditures for issue campaigns are murky at best. A new law to clamp down on petition circulation abuses by issue committees was closely monitored by the statewide watchdog group after allegations were raised in court that a variety of 2008 ballot groups were defrauding voters on the actual intent of the proposed law in order to compel them to sign petitions.
But serious transparency problems remain.
