New York Times Editorial: Full Disclosure

New York Times Editorial: Full Disclosure
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: June 25, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/opinion/26sat3.html?th&emc=th


Americans vote in secret, but they expect most other significant political acts to take place in the sunshine, from passing laws to making campaign donations. Anonymity in those areas is inimical to a robust democracy, and the Supreme Court was right on Thursday to rule that there is no constitutional right to hide in the shadows when signing a referendum petition.

The case involved an attempt last year to repeal Washington State’s domestic partnership law, which gave most of the benefits of marriage to same-sex partners. More than 137,000 people signed petitions for a referendum to repeal the law, enough to make it on the ballot. Several groups that supported the law asked the state for the names of those who signed the petitions, using the state’s open government act, and said that they planned to post the names on the Internet in a searchable format. (The repeal effort later failed.)

James Bopp Jr., the Indiana lawyer whose opposition to campaign finance and disclosure laws brought us the Citizens United case, filed a lawsuit on behalf of several petition-signers, saying the open government act violated the First Amendment rights of the signers. Disclosure of the names, he said, would lead to the social ostracism of the signers, as well as harassment and death threats, though he presented no evidence of this.

The court, in an opinion from which only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, sharply rebuffed Mr. Bopp, saying that, in general, the disclosure of names was legal to preserve the integrity of the referendum system. Disclosure is useful in combating fraud, the justices said, detecting invalid signatures and fostering government accountability.

This line of thinking follows directly from the Citizens United decision earlier this year, in which the court unleashed corporations to pollute the political environment with unlimited spending but at least allowed full disclosure of those expenditures. “Disclosure requirements may burden the ability to speak,” Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote for the court on Thursday, quoting the Citizens United decision, but “do not prevent anyone from speaking.”

In a concession to Mr. Bopp’s argument, the court said there may be limited times when specific circumstances call for shielding the names of petition-signers, and said the lower courts could determine when to do so. Fortunately, at least five justices made it clear that they did not believe that was true in this case. To paraphrase Justice John Paul Stevens’s concurrence: show us some actual evidence that a citizen really faces danger in signing a petition. Until then, the sun can shine.