Tell Your Supervisors: Protect Our vote "No" on both of the Ethics Commission’s “streamlining proposals” that would weaken our nation‑leading campaign finance and disclosure laws.”
Call ONE of the Supervisors. Note: only one of these Supervisors represents you. Find out which one here.
Call Script
Please call the SF Board of Supervisors Rules Committee members: Shamann Walton, Steven Sherill, and Rafael Mandleman:
My name is ____. I’m a constituent and a member of Indivisible SF. I am asking Supervisor ____ to vote “No” on both of the Ethics Commission’s “streamlining proposals” that would weaken our nation‑leading campaign finance and disclosure laws. [Optional: why this matters to you.]
Background
San Francisco's matching funds program empowers small donors and helps qualified candidates compete with Big Money by giving a 6-to-1 match on small donations from San Francisco residents. In exchange, they must agree to expenditure limits.
The expenditure limits are flexible allowing candidates who are subject to outside spending to spend more to respond. But now there's a "streamlining" proposal to completely remove spending limits for all candidates when there is significant outside spending — allowing unlimited spending even by the candidates whose SuperPAC funders blew through the limits!
On top of that, the proposal the Rules Committee is planning to vote on would double contribution limits from $500 to $1,000 and even double how much wealthy candidates can lend their own campaigns.
Supervisors Connie Chan, Chyanne Chen, Jackie Fielder, and Shamann Walton oppose these dangerous proposals. In addition, they all support legislation to pass California Clean Money Campaign's Good Government proposal, backed by California Common Cause, the League of Women Voters of San Francisco, and Indivisible SF to instead strengthen expenditure limits and make them more workable.
Just as bad: The Rules Committee will also be voting on a separate proposal to repeal longstanding disclosure requirements for developers, campaign consultants, and commissioners. You can see why this is such a terrible idea in the coalition letter opposing these disclosure changes.
We must stop these dangerous proposals from weakening San Francisco's nation-leading campaign finance and disclosure laws and ask the Board of Supervisors to pass the Good Government expenditure limit proposal instead.
Together we will create a government that is truly of, by and for the people.
Resources: California Clean Money Campaign