The state Democratic Party blew a truck-sized hole through its increasingly tattered reformist image this week. It did so with a mass mailing whose funding skirts state clean-election laws. The party sent the mailing out over the fierce objections of good-government groups.
The mailing touts Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s re-election. It was paid for with funds from the state party’s federal account — an account meant to help congressional, not state, campaigns and one that is liberally salted with contributions from state contractors.
State law bans state contractors from contributing to state candidates or to the party’s state account — to keep elections clean of their influence.
The party is claiming a loophole in federal law that allows a federal account to be used for get-out-the-vote activities, like mailings, that could — indirectly — benefit candidates at the state level. But this mailing was 99 percent a Malloy ad rather than a get-out-the-vote ad.
The mailing and its timing were brazen and cynical.
The Democrats’ ploy, if successful, will allow special-interest money back into state campaigns and weaken public support for Connecticut’s landmark taxpayer-financed Citizens Election Program.
The State Elections Enforcement Commission has emphatically denounced the Democrats’ mailing as violating the spirit of Connecticut’s election laws.
The state Democratic Party had earlier this month asked for an opinion on the mailing by the Federal Elections Commission, piously saying it wanted to ensure that its Malloy mailing met requirements of the federal law.
It then jumped the gun this week, sending out the mailer before the FEC could rule — flipping off both state and federal regulators in the process.
The state Democratic Party is just begging for punishment by regulators and by the voters.
http://www.courant.com/opinion/editorials/hc-ed-democrats-end-run-around-election-law-20141016-story.html
