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Campaign Disclosure Project to Advance Transparency
of Money in State Politics

For Immediate Release: Thursday, September 19, 2002
Contact: Joe Doherty, 310-206-2675

The UCLA School of Law, Center for Governmental Studies and California Voter Foundation today announced the launch of The Campaign Disclosure Project, designed to bring greater transparency and accountability to the role of money in state and federal campaigns. The project is funded by a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts.

"For thirty years the states have experimented with campaign finance disclosure," said Dan Lowenstein, Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law and the project's principal investigator. "But many states have fallen behind rapid changes in technology, and the role of money is sometimes hidden from the public or less quickly available than it should be."

The three groups are working together to improve campaign disclosure by creating model reporting standards, publishing working papers on disclosure related topics, and grading disclosure laws and web sites in the fifty states. "This is an opportunity to study the fifty state-level experiments in campaign disclosure and develop a new national model based upon the successes and failures in those laboratories of democracy," Lowenstein said.

The project's 17-member advisory board, made up of national disclosure experts from the governmental, academic, political, nonprofit and media sectors, will convene in San Francisco for their first meeting this week. Key project staff include Bob Stern and Tracy Westen with the Center for Governmental Studies, Kim Alexander with the California Voter Foundation, and Joe Doherty, Project Director, with the UCLA School of Law. More information about the project is available online at
www.campaigndisclosure.org.

Additional contact information:

Bob Stern/Tracy Westen, Center for Governmental Studies: 310-470-6590
Kim Alexander, California Voter Foundation: 530-750-7650
Dan Lowenstein, UCLA School of Law: 310-825-5148

Campaign Disclosure Project Advisory Board members:

Jan Baran, Wiley Rein & Fielding, LLP
Robert Biersack, Federal Election Commission
Prof. Bruce Cain, UC Berkeley
Prof. Anthony Corrado, Colby College
Jim Drinkard, USA Today
Brooks Jackson, CNN
Prof. Gary Jacobson, UC San Diego
Dr. David Jefferson, election technology and security consultant
Donna Lucas, NCG Porter Novelli
Colleen McAndrews, Bell, McAndrews, Hiltachk & Davidian
Dr. Ron Michaelson, Illinois Board of Elections
Larry Noble, Center for Responsive Politics
Dr. Norman Ornstein, American Enterprise Institute
Trevor Potter, Campaign and Media Legal Center
Samantha Sanchez, National Institute on Money in State Politics
Rebecca Vigil-Giron, New Mexico Secretary of State
Prof. Michael Schudson, UC San Diego

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