By January of most years, state officials roll out their individual wish lists of legislation that they say will benefit Mississippi, help their offices do their job or both.
So there’s nothing unusual about Secretary of State Michael Watson’s legislative agenda for 2024, other than it’s an excellent one.
Watson, starting his second term in office, wants to improve transparency in campaign finance reporting and crack down on those who ignore or defy the reporting laws.
During last year’s state elections, Watson and others complained how the Attorney General’s Office seemed disinterested, until late in the election cycle, about doing much of anything regarding investigating and prosecuting the apparent violations reported to it.
Watson is asking the Legislature to let his office do more than be the keeper of the records. He would like some enforcement authority, too.
Someone needs to enforce the laws, and if the Attorney General’s Office won’t do it, then give the secretary of state an opportunity to show that he will.
As far as transparency, Mississippi has clung to a cumbersome paper-based system of campaign finance reporting specifically because it makes it difficult for journalists, other candidates and the general public to track who is giving to whom. The Secretary of State’s Office has to scan in the reports, and while they are available on the internet, there is no good indexing system. What should take seconds to research with a robust electronic system instead can take hours.
Watson wants lawmakers to fund a new, digitally based campaign finance reporting system. He has estimated the cost at $2 million to $3 million — a price tag that the state can easily afford, given the hundreds of millions of dollars in surpluses it has been running the past couple of years.
Other good ideas proposed by Watson:
- Revoke the grandfather clause in state law that allows candidates to keep any money they have left over from pre-2018 campaign accounts. When lawmakers changed the law in 2017 to forbid candidates from using campaign donations on personal expenses, they got it through the Legislature by saying the new rule only applied to money raised from 2018 forward. As a result, about 40 politicians still possess retirement nest eggs of past campaign donations, totaling about $5 million, according to Watson. Gov. Tate Reeves leads the pack with $1.9 million tucked away. This money was given for election purposes, not personal ones. Whatever is left ideally should be returned to the contributors. If that is not feasible, then it should go to charity or possibly the political party the candidate represented.
- Forbid PAC-to-PAC contributions. This practice is just another way to try to hide who is bankrolling the candidates. Here’s how it usually works. A state PAC is set up as a pass-through. It receives money from a federal PAC, and then passes the money on to the candidate’s campaign. The state PAC reports to the secretary of state that its source of contribution is the federal PAC, but the identities of those who gave to the federal PAC go undisclosed.
There is no way to curtail the influence of money on elections, but there is a way to precisely track its flow and to punish those who try to cover it up. Watson’s recommendations would go a long way in that respect. They should be adopted.
