Relates to reporting of certain independent expenditures

◆ The sponsor's argument

Why Andrew Gounardes says this is needed

This bill closes several loopholes in New York State and City's laws governing campaign ad disclosure rules for independent expenditures (lEs) while strengthening enforcement for unlawful communications that are unduly influencing an election in real time. In recent decades, NYS has passed sweeping campaign finance reform laws, creating new definitions for "independent expenditure" in EL § 14-107(1)(a) and "independent expenditure committee" in EL § 14-100(15), clarifying when IE activities are considered coordinated with a campaign and thus subject to campaign contribution limits, and placing a series of stringent disclosure requirements on lEs.(1) Any individual wishing to form a committee for the purposes of making an independent expendi- ture, generally defined as any public-facing audio, video, or written advertisement or other statement advocating for or against a specific candidate or ballot proposal that is being circulated on or after Janu- ary 1st of the election year, or, if referencing a specific candidate, within 60 days of a general or special election or 30 days of a primary, must register their IE committee with the NYS Board of Elections (BOE), electronically disclose all contributions or loans of at least $1,000 and expenditures of over $5,000 to BOE within 24 hours.(2) An IE advertisement cannot be made at the behest of or in cooperation with a candidate or party committee, and, because IEs are not coordi- nated with a campaign, they are not subject to any of the contribution or spending limits that other forms of political spending must adhere to. This definition of IEs in state Election Law, therefore, is broadly intended to capture campaign expenditures which are clearly designed to influence the electorate despite the fact that they are being made inde- pendently of a candidate's campaign. Paid IE advertisements must contain an attribution at the bottom of the ad that clearly states the name of the person that paid for or otherwise published the ad as well as a statement that the communication was not expressly authorized or requested by a candidate or a candidate's committee (NYCRR § 6200.10(f)). The state BOE is also required to make a record of an IE committee's contributions, donors, expenditures, and a listing of all of their ads available online in a machine readable format pursuant to EL § 14-107(5-a). Statutory gaps and weak enforcement hamper the effectiveness of the Election Law's IE disclosure rules, however. Firstly, special interests form IE committees to run ads that are meant to influence the electorate but do not contain the magic words "vote," "oppose," "support," "elect," "defeat," or reject" prescribed in EL § 14-107(1)(a)(i), stop just short of referring to the candidate by name, and thus fall outside the bounds of the definition of "independent expenditure" in EL § 14-107(1)(a). The breadth of § 14-107's definition was recently put to the test in the 2025 NYC mayoral election, when an out-of-state conservative nonprofit tried to run an ad highlighting the dangers of socialism in advance of the NYC mayoral election. While this ad was clearly a reference to Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the eventual winner of that election, the nonprofit attempted to claim that they were engaging in general issue advocacy and so should not be subject to the state and city's donor disclosure and registration rules as prescribed in state Election Law and the New York City Charter. This bill closes this issue advocacy loophole by clarify- ing that when an IE's ad clearly and unambiguously references a candi- date by using their name, likeness, or other descriptor, or where the ad uses language or imagery substantially associated with the candidate such that a reasonable viewer would understand the communication as pertaining to the candidate and designed to influence the election, the communication must disclose its donors like any other IE.(3) Secondly, this bill dramatically improves enforcement against unlawfu

This is the sponsor's own case for the bill, quoted from their memorandum. It is not Agora's description of what the bill does.