Christian attorney warns churches against biased voter guides.

A prominent evangelical Christian attorney has warned churches and other religious ministries not to distribute voter guides that are biased or inaccurate.

David C. Gibbs Jr. of the Christian Law Association addressed the issue during a seminar on the law governing tax-exempt groups at the National Religious Broadcasters' annual meeting in Washington, D.C.. Feb. 3.

Gibbs warned churches that they can lose their tax-exempt status if they fail to adhere to three Internal Revenue Service criteria dealing with voter guides. Voter guides, Gibbs said, must be accurate, broadly based and cannot be distributed only at election time.

"Nothing from a tax exempt can go into supporting a candidate - zero," Gibbs said. "There's an absolute bar. So you cannot use your ministry, if it's tax exempt, to get behind a candidate."

Fleshing out the IRS rules, Gibbs stressed that voter guides must be accurate. "It has to be accurate," he said. "You say, 'But we didn't prepare it.' If you distribute it, the law now treats you the same as preparing it. And to put out an inaccurate voter guide voids your tax-exempt status. So be sure it is accurate. You might want to put a little note here: 80 percent of the voter guides had inaccuracies in them . . . . You say, 'But we're trusting XYZ group.' Double check them and make sure they're careful about it . . . . Remember, the guys who prepare voter guides normally are not tax exempt, so they don't have one to lose; you have the tax-exempt status."

Gibbs said the second rule is that the voter guide must be broad and cover a range of issues, some of which the religious ministry does not take a stand on. "You cannot just have the issues on it that are of value to you . . . ," he said. "Can we put a candidate's stand on homosexuality, abortion'? Yeah. But you gotta put more than that on it. You gotta put where they stand on aid to Asian rim nations and other things that don't matter to you. You have to broaden the issues, or they' re ruling that you're politicking . . . . Make sure at least half of the issues don't matter to you."

The final rule, Gibbs said, bans distribution of voter guides only at election time. "You have to hand it out at both election and non-election time," he said. "Otherwise, they've now ruled, it's not educational, it's politicking. November is election time. So you say, 'You mean, we should hand it out now?' That's right. Hand it out at least twice in the year with one of them not being an election period . . . . Remember, you can't tie it to politicking, but you can tie it to voter information."

Although Gibbs did not specifically mention the Christian Coalition, his remarks would seem to have special import for that organization. The Pat Robertson political group has been recruiting churches all over America to distribute its voter guides as part of an effort to elect conservative Republican candidates.

Critics say Coalition voter guides are likely to run afoul of all three of the IRS criteria. The guides are frequently inaccurate, they are almost always biased toward favored candidates and they rarely cover a broad range of issues. In addition, the group's strategy calls for releasing the voter guides the Sunday before an election so candidates whose views are distorted do not have time to set the record straight.