The Federal Election Commission (FEC) released an opinion on May 1 determining that federal officeholders and candidates are allowed to solicit funds for ballot measure committees without regard to the amount limitations and source restrictions in the Federal Election Campaign Act.
Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom, sponsors of an initiative that would create a state constitutional right to abortion targeting the 2024 ballot, requested the opinion from the FEC. The FEC is a regulatory agency composed of three Republican and three Democratic commissioners. Four of the commissioners (three Republicans and one Democrat) voted to approve the decision.
The FEC decision applies to all ballot measures in the signature-gathering phase and those that have qualified for the ballot.
The ruling would allow presidential candidates Joe Biden (D) and Donald Trump (R) to raise unlimited money for ballot measures.
In opposition to the FEC’s decision, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) wrote that under the decision, “federal candidates will be permitted to solicit funds in unlimited amounts that will be spent to influence those candidates’ own elections, including funds from foreign national sources,” and that “the risk of corruption inherent in direct foreign national contributions to candidates would simply metastasize to the ballot initiative context, with the same deleterious effect.”
Hans Von Spakovsky, former FEC member and manager of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative said the commission’s decision aligns with precedent set by the U.S. Supreme Court, which has previously ruled that the Federal Election Campaign Act only applies to candidate elections and not ballot measure elections.
Samuel Lee, president of Missouri Stands with Women, the campaign opposing an abortion rights initiative in Missouri, said, “We welcome this decision because it does allow members of Congress to help our efforts to defeat this initiative petition.”
The FEC issued an opinion in 2021 stating that the federal ban on foreign political contributions concerns candidate elections, not ballot measure campaigns. Therefore, the FEC affirmed that foreign individuals, corporations, and governments could contribute to ballot measure campaigns. The opinion resulted from a complaint filed against Sandfire Resources, which is incorporated in Australia and owns a firm in Canada. Sandfire contributed to the campaign opposing Montana I-186 in 2018. In 2023, U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-1) of Pennsylvania introduced House Resolution 4484 (HR 4484), the Keeping Foreign Money out of Ballot Measures Act. U.S. Rep. Jared Golden (D-2) of Maine co-sponsored HR 4484, which would make donations from foreign nationals to state or local ballot measure campaigns illegal. In 2024, five Republican U.S. senators introduced the Preventing Foreign Interference in American Elections Act, which was designed to prohibit foreign nationals from donating to ballot initiative campaigns.