Elections

Campaign reporting updates pass the Senate
|
The Senate approved a bill that seeks to simplify campaign reporting for some elected officials. The Senate passed the bill, a committee substitute for SB 42, on a 26-10 vote Saturday afternoon. “This bill continues the one thing that the United States Supreme Court has allowed us to do when it comes to regulating independent expenditures in our election cycle, and that is required disclosure,” bill sponsor Senate Majority Leader Peter Wirth, D-Santa Fe, said. “In 2019, we passed a comprehensive bill that for the first time defined some key terms, coordination being perhaps the most important when it came to independent expenditures, and over the last four years, what we found is, you know, it’s one of these areas where you have to constantly be working. And so this bill does a couple things: It closes some of the loopholes that have been used since we passed the bill in 2019…The bill also has some kind of cleanup provisions in the campaign reporting act.