Good governance groups behind a historic 2024 campaign finance reform law are calling on lawmakers to vote against a proposal meant to provide technical fixes to the law.
They say business and lobbying groups wrote it to render political spending limits moot, and fights over language in the bill have come to an apex in the Capitol.
Bill supporters say it’s needed to ensure contribution limits are enacted as scheduled in January 2027, and to give the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office enough time to roll out infrastructure needed to enhance reporting requirements.
In letters to lawmakers during the past week, campaign finance reform advocates have accused business and union groups of using the technical fix bill under consideration by the state Legislature — House Bill 4018 — to gut the 2024 law limiting campaign contributions and to stuff it with new provisions that create loopholes to the spending limits established.
The bill is in the Joint Ways and Means Committee, where it’s likely to undergo a rapid-fire committee vote before getting sent to the House and Senate floors for final votes before the session ends on March 8.
Representatives from the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office and House Speaker Julie Fahey’s Office — the lawmaker behind the technical fix bill — say it must pass so the rollout of the contribution limits happens on time and doesn’t cause unnecessary harm. The Legislature failed to act when a similar technical fix bill died during the 2025 long session, also due to concerns around language, and that it would allow spending loopholes.
“We were trying to figure out how to make sure that this bill could be implementable on the right timeline, knowing that the most important thing to voters is that we implement limits,” Fahey told reporters Tuesday.
Leaders at campaign finance reform advocacy groups Honest Elections, League of Women Voters, Common Cause of Oregon, Consolidated Oregon Indivisible Network and the state’s Independent and Progressive political parties say the greater concern is a law that does not in fact rein in spending. They’ve also said Fahey and her chief of staff, Scott Moore, have deliberately ignored them and left them out of conversations since the 2025 technical fix bill failed.
Business and union lobbyists from trade group Oregon Business and Industry and Our Oregon, a coalition of unions, have, on the other hand, been invited to weigh in on the bill for months.
“We’ve negotiated with them for two years in good faith and now they’re shutting us out,” said Jason Kafoury, a Portland attorney and one of the leaders of Honest Elections Oregon.
Labor unions, business groups and good government groups have long sparred over the best approach to money in politics, but the prospect of competing ballot measures over campaign finance reform as opposed to legislative policy forced lawmakers to act in 2024.
Moore on Tuesday confirmed that he had not talked to representatives from the good governance groups in months, saying they were unwilling to negotiate and compromise with the union and business groups. Moore also said the bill has enough votes to pass.
Spokespersons for Our Oregon did not respond to a request for information on bill involvement from the Capital Chronicle, but leaders have testified in support of it. A spokesperson for Oregon Business and Industry, Erik Lukens, said Thursday that officials were too busy to respond to questions before Friday afternoon.
Critiques and loopholes
Critics of House Bill 4018 and its amendments say many of the changes proposed aren’t necessary technical changes related to reporting requirements that would be costly or cause implementation delays for the Secretary of State’s Office, but that simply make campaign finance limits pointless.
Among the largest sticking points is the bill authors’ decision to strike “coordinated expenditures” from the 2024 law as a qualified contribution that would be subject to spending limits. Coordinated expenditures are things such as buying ads to promote a candidate, in coordination with the candidate.
“So let’s say I’m Chevron. I can either give a $5,000 check to a candidate. Or, I can spend $1 million on ads for the candidate, and independently coordinate with the candidate to be sure they like the ads, and that’s not subject to limits,” Kafoury said. “It makes a mockery of the campaign finance limits in the law.”
Jill Bakken, a spokesperson for Fahey, and Tess Seger, a spokesperson for Secretary of State Tobias Read, said the bill already has an expansive definition of contributions that would be interpreted to include coordinated expenditures and that including the term is “duplicative” and “redundant.” Seger said Read would enforce coordinated expenditures as contributions.
But Patrick Llewellyn, director of state campaign finance at the National Campaign Legal Center, said that would not go over well in court, and that a judge would probably consider why lawmakers had deleted a definition from a law that they wanted to enforce.
“I don’t think deleting that portion of the definition makes it clearer. To me, it raises ambiguity where the law is already clear right now: that coordinated expenditures are a form of contribution. By deleting it from the definition, it raises questions as to whether they would continue to be treated that way,” Llewellyn said.
Other changes would allow donors to create multiple LLCs or committees to contribute money to a candidate, as long as the donors did not create the LLC or committee for the “sole purpose” of circumventing the law. As long as they can define another purpose for creating a second or third LLC, each of those can donate at limit to a candidate, Llewellyn explained.
“I’m not familiar with any other jurisdictions setting a ‘sole purpose’ standard for determining if two entities are affiliated and should share a contribution,” he said.
The bill also changes “in-kind” contribution limits, such as donated food, drinks and transportation as applying to each donor, not to each candidate. The 2024 law stated those limits applied to the aggregate amount the candidate could receive.
Bakken said this is because the rest of the 2024 contribution regulations apply to contributors, not candidates, and the in-kind section wasn’t meant to be different.
Dan Meek, a Portland attorney representing the Honest Elections coalition, said that is “irrelevant” and that explanations for changes from the speaker’s office were “senseless.”
Sen. Jeff Golden, D-Ashland, a longtime campaign finance reform supporter, said he’s not sure if Moore from Fahey’s office is right about having enough votes to pass House Bill 4018, but that it does not have his vote. The Senate Rules Committee will host one last informational meeting on Monday morning related to campaign finance reform and the bill, according to Golden, who is a member of the committee. He said it’s an effort to make clear what the bill would do.
“This is not an honest bill. That it merely deals with implementation problems is wrong,” he said.
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