Opinion - Top opinion

POSTED: Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2009

Nothing outweighs public's right to know list of campaign donors

If you try hard enough, you can find a reason to close the door on open government.

Most government documents worth looking at contain information that might embarrass someone, might cost someone their job or their reputation, might expose them to bad behavior by bad people.

But for nearly 40 years in Washington state, we've decided collectively that the occasional harm from open records is vastly outweighed by the benefits. And despite frequent erosion of the records law by legislators enamored of each new anecdote or horror story, we still have a pretty good law.

Now comes the latest threat, not from legislators or bureaucrats but from people who consider themselves outsiders. Backers of Referendum 71, calling themselves Protect Marriage Washington, have already succeeded in persuading a federal judge - temporarily for now - to screen the public from the names of those who signed the petitions to repeal the latest expansion of gay partnership rights.

State Attorney General Rob McKenna and Secretary of State Sam Reed didn't contest the request so a dangerous precedent was created, at least until a Sept. 3 hearing.

Now R-71 supporters want the state Public Disclosure Commission to keep the public from using the heart and soul of open government - the right to know who gave how much to what campaigns. Claiming that supporters of the referendum have been threatened with harassment and even violence, they want the names of campaign funders kept secret.

And they haven't even waited for the PDC to act on the request. Beginning last week the group stopped reporting the full names of donors, instead listing them by initials only. The PDC will discuss the issue at its Aug. 27 meeting.

It's not that the Referendum 71 backers don't have a good story to tell. A lawyer for the organization produced e-mails and Web postings from nutbars who threatened those who signed the petitions or are funding the campaign. More mainstream gay rights groups have sought to post the names on the Web.

Offensive? Yes. But the way to combat such abuses is to use existing state law. It is illegal to threaten people for any reason, especially their political actions. It is illegal for an employer to punish employees for their politics. Besides, scummy politics don't win votes from the middle, the voters who decide close elections.

That said, it is a fact of life that some people won't do business with people they disagree with. In Olympia, a popular grocery store is off limits to abortion rights supporters because the store is challenging the requirement that it dispense Plan B contraceptives. During the Red Scare of the 1950s, the businessmen on the Tacoma School Board were threatened with boycotts if they didn't fire a teacher who had invoked the Fifth Amendment before Congress.

There are plenty of other examples.

The gay rights issue is especially volatile. But if these exemptions are allowed, how hard will it be for backers of others issues such as assisted suicide to convince a judge that they are threatened? Tim Eyman has accused the National Education Association union of using the names of signers of his latest tax cut initiative to threaten rank-and-file teachers who signed. The union denies the charge, but if it were true, would Eyman have a case for sealing the supporters of tax-cut initiatives as well?

Some years back it was the gay rights side of the debate that sought exemptions from disclosure law. In 1994, Hands Off Washington asked that the occupations and employers of donors be kept secret. While the PDC allowed the exclusion temporarily, it was reversed when the Legislature failed to act.

When the Legislature the next year passed a change to exclude occupation and employers from all campaign reporting, then-Gov. Mike Lowry vetoed it.

"I believe that the public's right to information about elections and who influences those elections outweighs the purported need to protect the privacy of individual contributors," Lowry's veto message said.

Even then, however, no one questioned the necessity of having donor names reported, regardless of the consequences. That sentiment shouldn't change.