The shocking assassination of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband at their home has prompted a wave of proposals to protect lawmakers’ home addresses.
But lawmakers aren’t the only ones at risk. Current campaign finance disclosure laws expose millions of Americans to danger, too. These laws reveal people’s political views in public online databases, often for contributions as small as a single dollar.
Protecting elected officials from political violence is rightly a priority. But we must also extend some privacy protections to the citizens who support them.
And we’ve seen an appropriately swift response to shield lawmakers following the Hortman tragedy. Colorado, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Minnesota itself have all taken steps to remove legislators’ personal information from official websites.
The prompt and decisive action in the wake of the assassination plot recognizes that easily accessible personal information poses a significant risk in an age of political division.
Yet, woefully outdated campaign finance laws leave ordinary Americans unprotected. This is a threat that Federal Election Commission Commissioner Dara Lindenbaum, one of the agency’s Democratic members, described in detail in a May 2024 statement.
At a time when political divisions run deep, outdated campaign finance laws pose obvious risks for Americans who support candidates and causes with modest gifts that pose no threat of corruption.
Current federal law states that anyone donating over $200 to a federal candidate in an election cycle has their name and address published in an online database, forever. So, someone donating just $30 a month would appear after seven months. The law further mandates that committees use “best efforts” to obtain and report occupation and employer information.
Worse, when such contributions are routed through popular internet giving platforms, the $200 threshold doesn’t apply. This means that millions who made small contributions of even a dollar – believing their donations to be anonymous – had their personal information permanently published online.
The Minnesota assassin used data brokers to locate potential victims’ addresses. But someone targeting a donor for supporting an “incorrect” candidate could avoid data brokers and simply use freely available government websites.
To its credit, the FEC recognized this problem and recently unanimously approved recommending that Congress prohibit the public disclosure of contributors’ street addresses. The address information would still be reported to the FEC but not be posted publicly. Thus, this reform would eliminate the location data that could facilitate violence or harassment.
However, present rules also set disclosure thresholds far too low – amounts so small that concerns about “corruption” are completely absurd. The current $200 disclosure threshold went into effect over 45 years ago. If that threshold had been indexed to inflation, it would be over $800 today.
State laws are worse. A recent Institute for Free Speech analysis of state disclosure laws reports that state thresholds have a median of just $100, with eight states requiring disclosure for any amount – even a penny.
When governments passed laws setting those thresholds, you could only view these records in government filing cabinets, which often required a long trip. Today, the report notes, “the same research might take five minutes” online and exposes “your personal history of contributing, even if you made those contributions decades ago.”
Frozen thresholds mean that inflation has steadily expanded the pool of Americans subject to disclosure while the information has simultaneously become much more accessible.
This must change. For statewide races, disclosure should include only those who contribute a substantial amount – say, $2,500 or more – along with inflation indexing to prevent it from eroding again. This would protect Americans making modest contributions while easing compliance for campaigns, many of which are run by volunteers who struggle to track small donations.
Shrinking the pool of donors whose information must be disclosed and limiting that information to maintain privacy is a two-pronged solution that is essential to protecting donor safety.
The Minnesota tragedy serves as a stark reminder that personal information can help enable violence. Rather than making every political participant a potential target, we should adopt sensible privacy protections that allow robust participation with less risk.
It’s past time for lawmakers to take a more nuanced approach to reporting campaign donations. Let’s hope they act soon.
