Ballot measures target campaign money.

Byline: David Steves The Register-Guard

SALEM - Oregon could lose its status as one of the last frontiers for unlimited campaign contributions if voters pass a pair of measures approved Friday for the ballot.

The two measures - one a constitutional amendment and the other a change in state law - would drastically reduce the flow of money from unions, corporations, interest groups and rich individuals.

As it now stands, Oregon is one of five states in the country that allow unlimited contributions, such as the $150,000 check a manufacturers' trade group wrote to Supreme Court candidate Jack Roberts this spring and the $469,964 the Oregon Public Employees Union gave Gov. Ted Kulongoski in his 2002 campaign.

Such contributions would be banned if the two measures win approval in the Nov. 7 election. The state Elections Division determined that both received more than the required number of signatures - 100,840 for the constitutional amendment and 75,630 for the statutory measure.

Voters in 1994 passed an initiative that capped the amounts candidates could receive from donors. Those restrictions were followed in the 1996 campaign cycle, but the Oregon Supreme Court overturned the measure, ruling that the state constitution's free expression protections apply to campaign contributions.

Backers of the two measures approved Friday see a way around that court ruling: by changing the Oregon Constitution. One of the measures consists of a constitutional amendment that authorizes the voters or the Legislature to "prohibit or limit contributions and expenditures of any type or description, to influence the outcome of any election."

The companion measure does just that: It bans corporations, labor unions and other entities from making contributions to candidate campaigns. Individuals' candidate-race contributions would be limited to $500 in any statewide race and $100 in any nonstatewide race, including for the Legislature or local offices. Individuals also could contribute $50 a year to any small donor committee, $500 to any political committee and $2,000 to any political party. The combination of such contributions could not exceed $2,500 a year from any individual.

One of the chief advocates for the measures, Harry Lonsdale, a Central Oregon businessman who ran for the U.S. Senate in the 1990s, said the proliferation of special-interest money in campaigns is drowning out the voices of ordinary citizens.

"Oregon politics is completely dominated by big money. These measures will get big money out of Oregon politics," said Lonsdale, a longtime advocate for campaign finance reform who ran a largely self-financed campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1992.

Tom Chamberlain, president of the AFL-CIO, said the measure would fall short of that goal. He cited Oregon's experience in 1996 under the previous campaign-finance restrictions. The money that would have been spent by candidates was instead spent by anonymous "independent expenditure" campaigns. They specialized in putting out hard-hitting attack ads against their favored candidates' opponents. The biggest shortcoming, Chamberlain said, was that voters couldn't punish independent-expenditure campaigns for crossing the line with nasty or truth-stretching attack ads.

"The problem is, it's hard to hold the candidate accountable for what's done," he said. "All it did was create a forum where people could do whatever they wanted. At least (with) what we have now, the candidate is accountable."

The American Civil Liberties of Oregon filed a legal challenge last spring against the constitutional amendment, which resulted in a Court of Appeals ruling that it was invalid because it contained multiple amendments: one that allows for the regulation of campaign contributions and another that requires the Legislature to do so with a three-fourths majority. That ruling has been challenged and awaits a decision by the Oregon Supreme Court.

If the civil liberties group loses in its attempt to keep the measure off the ballot, it will make the case to voters - along with business, labor, and other groups that have historically made large campaign contri- butions.

"Our mission is to protect the Bill of Rights, and these measures will weaken the protection of free expression in Oregon in the context of political campaigns," he said.